A Wordsnake puzzle is a list of words which must be arrange in an overlapping fashion. The entire list is called a "wordsnake", and is scored by squaring the overlaps of each consecutive pair, and adding. We allow the wordsnake to "wrap around", so there's one extra score for overlap from the last word to the first.
A wordsnake is actually a form of the traveling salesman problem, and hence, theoretically, it can be very hard to determine the maximum possible score.
The words in Dennis Shasha's challenge are:
| alas | ally | blemish | blend |
| certain | dense | denude | eloped |
| emerge | essential | eternal | geriatric |
| gerund | icer | incredible | ingrate |
| invent | lasting | later | lending |
| merger | mishapen | pediatric | penultimate |
| rates | sea | seem | stinger |
| sudden | tense | terrestrial | terrible |
| tessilate | trials | trice | tricky |
| underdevelop | yes | yet | _ |
Reference:
I give up, show me the solution.