Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#21

Post by mFixman » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #17

mFixman wrote: post #14

IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels. If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer…

Does the game in other languages assign the same point values to letters? Is the distribution of letters the same? It seems like a different language would have more or less frequencies of any particular letter which should influence the amount of available tiles and what they are worth.

The board and (letter distribution × score) distribution are almost identical between languages.

There are always a couple of letters with extremely high scores, and the winning tactic is to play ugly short words with those letters by the multipliers.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#22

Post by yifanl » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

ape4 wrote: post #8

Elite Scrabble players look at the language differently than speakers. For example you need to know words with 'Q' but no 'U'. Not something that comes up in everyday speech. https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/...

I could probably be convinced that not having any natural-preconceptions of the language actually leads to better performance in Scrabble: you're only concerned about knowing all the high-value words, and not the words you'd use in conversation, which presumably isn't at all related.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#23

Post by cdelsolar » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:52 PM UTC

mFixman wrote: post #14

IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels. If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer…

that's a ridiculous take; Scrabble is one of the best games ever invented.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#24

Post by k__ » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:53 PM UTC

nippoo wrote: post #19

I was at the World Scrabble Championships in Prague a few years ago (with Nigel Richards). The amazing thing was how many of the highest-level Scrabble players were Thai and spoke barely any English. There are about 200,000 words in the Scrabble dictionary and and an average English speaker only knows 40,000. So knowing the language doesn't give a huge advantage, and all competitors end up spending years memorising w…

To make it more interesting, they could give out new official fantasy word lists every year.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#25

Post by gambiting » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #17

mFixman wrote: post #14

IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels. If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer…

Does the game in other languages assign the same point values to letters? Is the distribution of letters the same? It seems like a different language would have more or less frequencies of any particular letter which should influence the amount of available tiles and what they are worth.

Yes, the Polish version of scrabble doesn't have the letter X at all(since there are no Polish words which use it), and it has all of the Polish-specific letters added, with the rarity based score recalculated for Polish - for example Z is worth 1, since it's an extremely common letter in Polish:

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble#/media/Plik:Polskie_s...

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#26

Post by furyofantares » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

mFixman wrote: post #14

IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels. If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer…

Scrabble is a really wonderful competitive game that has very little to do with language. As a competitive game it has the novelty of randomization combined with an incredible skill depth and ability to sort competitors accurately.

What sucks is that this doesn't match expectations for a word game at all. If you're playing for light wordplay, or for competitive wordplay, your goals don't align with the game's scoring system at all. This can be OK if you're playing with another person with the same values as you, but it sucks to whatever degree there's a mismatch. This means it can still be great for at-home play but it can also be quite unexpectedly poor.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#27

Post by doppp » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

"Scrabble isn't a word game. It's an area-control game with 150,000 definitions of legal placement for your resources."

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#28

Post by braythwayt » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 4:22 PM UTC

The disconnect between "Scrabble the word game" and "Scrabble the area game with a semi-arbitrary set of rules for tile placement that is somewhat related to words" has been discussed here before.

But honestly, it isn't that exceptional a disconnect. Most board games have a "theme" that increases our enjoyment. But many of them are actually math games that could be played without thinking about the theme at all.

Chess is like that. Our knowledge of horses and bishops won't help us play chess. Same with Acquire. Hotel chains don't behave anything like contiguous tiles on a grid.

I'm about to order a copy of "Thunderbirds." The review I read said that it's quite enjoyable, but if you aren't a fan of the show, the theme actually gets in the way of enjoying the underlying game.

I feel like it may be more obvious when a Scrabble player wins a world championship despite not speaking the language, but the disconnect between a game as an abstract contest and a game's theme is very common.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#29

Post by orcul » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 4:23 PM UTC

The embodiment of Machine Learning.

Re: Man wins French Scrabble championship without speaking a word of French (2015)

#30

Post by dghughes » Mon, Oct 28, 2019, 4:24 PM UTC

ape4 wrote: post #8

Elite Scrabble players look at the language differently than speakers. For example you need to know words with 'Q' but no 'U'. Not something that comes up in everyday speech. https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/...

Their motives are qabalistic.