41–50 of 92 posts
I got sucked into a variant of Scrabble insanity. In 2018 I spent close to six months writing a Scrabble engine, initially as an exercise to learn OCaml. But the algorithmic challenges pulled me deep down a fascinating rabbit hole. Eventually I was recording IRL games with my wife so I could analyze the positions, trying to understand why/how to exchange more often, and trying to make the engine ever stronger. It sti…
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I wonder about going the other way, adding more short words that make the game flow better (how about VI? Or just allow any two letter combination?). My experience having briefly gotten into competitive scrabble 15 years ago is that memorizing the short words is the price of admission for a more fun game. Knowing the short words makes it possible to fit the long words on the board.
If you're going to go that way, the obvious word to add would be ov, a more "cult" spelling of the word "of" instead of "za" I would suggest "ze" as a pronoun for a non-binary person
I got sucked into a variant of Scrabble insanity. In 2018 I spent close to six months writing a Scrabble engine, initially as an exercise to learn OCaml. But the algorithmic challenges pulled me deep down a fascinating rabbit hole. Eventually I was recording IRL games with my wife so I could analyze the positions, trying to understand why/how to exchange more often, and trying to make the engine ever stronger. It sti…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I play Polish Scrabble competitively, and IME there’s much more to the game than just memorizing the dictionary. A program that has full knowledge of the dictionary and always plays the highest-scoring word will easily yield to a human. There’s virtually no strategy, but tactics is of paramount importance. Things like keeping your rack balanced; which one of several similarly-scoring words to play, based on your know…
Computers are better than humans at Scrabble [0], so the possibility exists for cheating even if their advantage doesn't stem only from mastery of the dictionary. [0] I don't know how much better - but Maven was considered better than the best humans in 2002, and in most such pursuits, machines have improved faster than humans since then https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437020...
Fast forward 20 years and now I have a Scrabble Solver app (open source) in my portfolio that I'm proud of. It still needs improvements to run nicely on mobile but I'm happy with how it runs on desktop.
Maybe someone will find it useful, so I'm sharing here :)
I had a brief interest in scrabble, but when I played against online players and computers, I lost the interest all together. The problem was that Scrabble dictionary is too inclusive, and the Scrabble game rewards making multiple words. So, instead of learning fun and obscure words, it’s more important to spot how to make viable grids that gives you five words with one move, while involving some high-scored letters.…
Enough was enough. I installed a Scrabble game on my phone. Played every day and took the crown at our next Christmas Scrabble game. The win thoroughly surprised everyone.
That year I had read Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset. Which the Scrabble win nicely illustrated.
I got Scrabble as a Christmas gift about 20 years ago and I immediately fell in love with it. Fast forward 20 years and now I have a Scrabble Solver app (open source) in my portfolio that I'm proud of. It still needs improvements to run nicely on mobile but I'm happy with how it runs on desktop. Maybe someone will find it useful, so I'm sharing here :) https://scrabble-solver.org https://github.com/kamilmielnik/scrab…
A recommendation for the solver part, it seems your using a word trie instead of the more common directed acyclic word graph (DAWG) or the much faster GADDAG. GADDAGs are really cool, +2x faster lookup than DAWGs at 5x space for common Scrabble dictionaries? Even today's CPU cache sizes fit an English GADDAG with ease. [1]
I am working on a project for reinforcement learning for Scrabble, hoping to learn advanced strategies. When I need a front-end, I will definitely reference your project.
What's interesting to me is that it's not just anagrams. It's anagrams with letters alphabetically sorted.
So you learn the key, the sorted word, and associate with it the sensibly ordered version (calling it sensible might be a bit of a stretch for some weird words or words in foreign language).
As you play, you sort your letters and try to match then with learned keys by omiting some of the letters and possibly including some letters that you see on the board.
Then out of all the options you have you try to pick the one that's most beneficial for you at this point according to game mechanic because it scores a lot for you, or prevents oponent from scoring, or leaves you enough letter for to score next round.
But you can imagine that memorizing as many pairs of (sorted letter, word) so that they come to you effortlessly is pretty much basic requirement to play the game any good.