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Inspired by the game Candy Crush I devised a new type of puzzles which go under the name Letter Crush $^{TM}$ puzzles.

How to solve a Letter Crush $^{TM}$ puzzle:

A puzzle consists of a stack of letter-squares. Within the stack one has to find special keywords like in an ordinary puzzle. The words may appear as a horizontal, vertical or diagonal line, and it may be spelled forward or backward. So there are eight valid orientations:

enter image description here

Any discovered word may be 'selected' and removed from the grid.
The letters above it will then slide down to fill the gaps:

enter image description here
becomes:
enter image description here

It is very important to note, that keywords do not automatically get removed.
Only keywords that you want to remove, are removed.

The general aim of Letter Crush $^{TM}$ puzzles is to remove as many keywords as possible.

Now, in the Letter Crush $^{TM}$ puzzle below I have used the surnames of some special friends as keywords. All these friends share a common trait (which you will need to discover in order to identify them all). They are also fairly known and their names easily appear in Google searches of their common trait.

This is the puzzle:

Puzzle ( Convenience link to the data as Google Sheet and OpenOffice file )
( And an even more convenient online webapp thanks to M Oehm )

To solve the puzzle completely, you will need to remove the surnames of all 39 of my special friends.

A complete solution consists of:

  • The common trait
  • The list of all (39) keywords ordered in sequence as removed
  • The final grid with left-over letters

Hints = spoiler section

The below are (mild) spoilers restricting the search-space a bit. You don't need them, but if you feel the task is too formidable, you might want to peek...

Hint 1:

None of my friends has a surname with less than 4 letters.

Hint 2:

If any of the names of my friends would use non-English letters, I would have used the simplified version in the puzzle. ( ü $\Rightarrow$ u)

Hint 3:

Most of my friends have longer surenames. There are only two of them with 4-letters and only 11 with 5-letters. All others are longer. Up to 11 letters.

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BmyGuest
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  • For the complete solution, are all 40 keywords removed instantly (i.e., as they are found)? – DooplissForce Aug 10 '16 at 21:33
  • Could you give us the link to the actual (locked) sheet? The HTML file doesn't really help, since we can't copy it into our own spreadsheets. – Deusovi Aug 10 '16 at 21:36
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    The "spread-sheet" doesn't appear to match the grid shown here. E.g., 7th column from the right, 6th row from the bottom, is H here and E there. – Gareth McCaughan Aug 10 '16 at 22:00
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    Unless there are a lot of red herrings, there is a fairly obvious theme... – Gareth McCaughan Aug 10 '16 at 22:05
  • @GarethMcCaughan The theme is and should be fairly obvious. No intentional red herrings in this one. – BmyGuest Aug 11 '16 at 05:27
  • @DooplissForce No, one at a time. Falling letters rearrange and thus make new keywords appear (or disappear). Otherwise it would be a simple word search only. – BmyGuest Aug 11 '16 at 05:38
  • @Deusovi I think I've done it correctly now, could you check? – BmyGuest Aug 11 '16 at 07:54
  • @GarethMcCaughan I have update the link to the sheet. What apparently happened was that column 6 & 7 were swapped during dragging when I resized the cells. Thanks for noticing! – BmyGuest Aug 11 '16 at 07:55
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    makes me think of Words Crush: Hidden Words – dcfyj Aug 11 '16 at 14:17
  • @dcfyj Cool. Didn't know this, but suspected that the idea is not completely new. It would be too obvious an idea to not have sparked in somebody else's mind as well. – BmyGuest Aug 11 '16 at 14:27
  • @BmyGuest As far as I know, they have no boards remotely as large as yours. Although their words don't always go in straight lines. – dcfyj Aug 11 '16 at 14:28
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    I've yet to spot the apparently obvious theme, but for what it's worth, I've created a prototype of an online version of the game. It's rough, but might be useful for attacking this puzzle. (Caveat: Tested only in Firefox and IE11.) – M Oehm Aug 11 '16 at 15:09
  • @MOehm Perfect! I've edited in the link to the puzzle itself. Very helpful! – BmyGuest Aug 11 '16 at 15:14
  • @BMyGuest, do you want to tell us whether the sequence of words is actually completely determined (i.e., any change in the order makes it no longer to remove all 40 names)? You might not want to say, since the answer could be useful information when solving. – Gareth McCaughan Aug 11 '16 at 16:48
  • (It looks to me as if there are a couple of very likely candidates that it clearly can't be useful to delay. But I might be missing some subtlety -- or one or both might turn out to be red herrings.) – Gareth McCaughan Aug 11 '16 at 16:54
  • @GarethMcCaughan I can tell you that there is at least one sequence which will get you to the end, but there are certainly a couple of keywords where the order would not matter. (If you have two words on the top level, it trivially doesn't matter which one you remove first.) So no, it is not 100% determined. – BmyGuest Aug 11 '16 at 17:20
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    @GarethMcCaughan - I've gone back many times to not invite friends that would stop "better" friends from being invited later on... – Jonathan Allan Aug 11 '16 at 17:20
  • And no red herrings added (on purpose) – BmyGuest Aug 11 '16 at 17:20
  • Jonathan: Yes, absolutely. I wasn't asking "does a greedy approach suffice?" -- clearly it doesn't -- but "are there any pairs of names that can be interchanged?", which I thought there surely were and indeed BmyGuest has confirmed that there are. – Gareth McCaughan Aug 11 '16 at 17:39
  • Jonathan, have you yet noticed the pair of identical friends towards the left side of whom one clearly can't have both? I think we will need to take the less obvious of the two. I'm not quite sure why I'm trying to solve this thing by hand, though, when almost certainly I would do better to get a computer to do it. Assuming I can find a list guaranteed to contain all the names. BmyGuest, would you like to indicate whether they're all present on the "obvious" Wikipedia list page? – Gareth McCaughan Aug 11 '16 at 17:43
  • @GarethMcCaughan go to puzzles-etc.... comments not really for discussions (he used Google) – Jonathan Allan Aug 11 '16 at 17:50
  • I know he used Google, but when stocking a program's list of names "everything on page X" is more manageable than "everything that produces hits in a Google search when combined with ____". You're right that chat should be elsewhere; sorry. – Gareth McCaughan Aug 11 '16 at 18:01
  • @GarethMcCaughan I will not provide the list exactly to not have a computer solve it :c) If this is too hard, I will eventually provide a list of 40 first names, but I think people will get it without... Oh, and I did not use any wiki for this one ;c) – BmyGuest Aug 11 '16 at 18:08
  • Suggestion: once this is done post a PPCG challenge to write a program to both create and solve these puzzles - create input: wordlist and grid dimensions - solve input wordlist and grid. Then watch as a 9 byte solution rolls in :p – Jonathan Allan Aug 11 '16 at 18:57
  • Fair enough. Anyway, I think I'm more or less done now -- I have all the names and the final letters and just need to find an order that actually works. So no more hints, please :-). – Gareth McCaughan Aug 11 '16 at 19:05
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    Be prepared for an onslaught of Letter Crush puzzles. And then the inevitable Trivia Letter Crush where you need to know the names of Pokémon to solve it. – APrough Aug 11 '16 at 19:42

1 Answers1

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So it turns out (see comments) that actually there are only 39 names, not 40. Here they are in order:

OPPENHEIMER SOMMERFELD CHADWICK THOMSON NEWTON HOOKE RUTHERFORD GAMOW FEYNMAN LORENTZ TESLA WIGNER BETHE HEISENBERG HAWKING BECQUEREL MAXWELL PLANCK PAULI MEITNER RAMAN RONTGEN HERTZ AMPERE FARADAY FERMI DIRAC KIRCHHOFF PASCAL GALILEI BOHR SCHRODINGER BORN DOPPLER COMPTON VOLTA CURIE BOLTZMANN EINSTEIN

and they are of course all

great physicists

and the final grid is

a single row saying BROUGHTTOYOUBYBMYGUEST.

Courtesy of BmyGuest himself, here is the initial grid colour coded:

enter image description here

And step by step, courtesy of Jonathan Allen:

Red is right-to-left for horizontal / diagonal and bottom-to-top for vertical; black borders show what is about to be removed (white & bordered having been found earlier).
step by step image

Gareth McCaughan
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