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Solving the Spelling Bee Honeycomb Puzzle

David Robinson has fun with puzzle-solving:

Solving this puzzle in R is interesting enough, but it’s particularly challenging to do so in a computationally efficient way. As much as I love the tidyverse, this, like the “lost boarding pass” puzzle and Emily Robinson’s evaluation of the best Pokémon team, serves as a great example of using R’s matrix operations to work efficiently with data.

I’ve done a lot of puzzles recently, and I realized that showing the end result isn’t a representation of my thought process. I don’t show all the dead ends and bugs, or explain why I ended up choosing a particular path. So in the same spirit as my Tidy Tuesday screencasts, I recorded myself solving this puzzle (though not the process of turning it into a blog post).

Most of the post is analysis around the problem, but you do get a viable solution as well.