Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

lithub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 92 posts

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#81

Post by zem »

Someone wrote: post #69
gillesjacobs wrote: post #36

Been casually trying to increase my ELO on Wordfeud. When you know the dictionary by heart (Wordfeud has rather restricted dictionaries) and have the basics of bonus hunting and hooking down, Scrabble becomes a pure game of imperfect knowledge and strategy. The known information is the prior letter distribution, the played letters on the board and in your rack. The unknown information is your opponent's rack. However…

> However, you can compute exact letter probabilities for his rack and strategize accordingly. I think the best programs run Monte Carlo simulations on the contents of their opponent’s rack. That includes modeling their opponent’s moves, and thus improves on just computing these probabilities. As a simple example, if they played a move, but, if they had an ‘e’, could have made a much better move, chances are they did…

I don't think either quackle or macondo do opponent leave inference (elise might though), they just run forward simulations using the pool of unseen tiles.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#82

Post by zem »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

I thought I was good at scrabble but then I realized that playing against my parents does not count. Experts just memorize dictionaries. Just anther example of a game that has been optimized. Would not surprise me if we see a cheating scandal similar to professional chess.

scrabble cheating scandals have typically involved palming tiles, not computer assistance

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#83

Post by tlavoie »

Speaking of Scrabble, is there a decent online version for playing against other people? My wife loved the version that worked on her iPad, despite some clear bugs. I understand that it got killed off, to be replaced essentially with "Words with Friends", with all sorts of infantile blinking animations and unrelated cruft.

She loved being able to play long-distance with family members, and even met some new people to chat and play with from other countries.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#84

Post by jasone »

Someone wrote: post #69
gillesjacobs wrote: post #36

Been casually trying to increase my ELO on Wordfeud. When you know the dictionary by heart (Wordfeud has rather restricted dictionaries) and have the basics of bonus hunting and hooking down, Scrabble becomes a pure game of imperfect knowledge and strategy. The known information is the prior letter distribution, the played letters on the board and in your rack. The unknown information is your opponent's rack. However…

> However, you can compute exact letter probabilities for his rack and strategize accordingly. I think the best programs run Monte Carlo simulations on the contents of their opponent’s rack. That includes modeling their opponent’s moves, and thus improves on just computing these probabilities. As a simple example, if they played a move, but, if they had an ‘e’, could have made a much better move, chances are they did…

This was the idea that I kicked around for years before eventually writing a Scrabble engine in 2018. But by the time I got to the point where Monte Carlo simulation of the opponent's rack leave became feasible, I questioned the utility. Part of the problem is that if your opponent knows you incorporate such a simulation into the analysis, it's possible to subvert the analysis. And the most obvious counter is to not do the simulation. Another issue is that the advantage gained by opponent rack leave simulation is subtle, and it's costly to run enough games to measure the overall utility. I ended up instead putting my effort into controlling search depth termination with uncertainty estimation (spend more time on the portions of the tree that are more volatile).

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#85

Post by dangerhorse »

If anyone is interested in trying out a novel variant of Scrabble, please check out my game Lexatious, available for Android and iOS. Can be played single-player (against a bot) or two-player.

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.egjackson.... iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lexatious/id1614332855

In a nutshell you race to form a path of words across a board, while your opponent tries to form a path from the top to the bottom.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#86

Post by iopq »

mbg721 wrote: post #54
iopq wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What do you suggest as a substitute insufferable way of referring to pizza?

I already said, no more za, add "ze" as in a non-binary person

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#87

Post by ElfinTrousers »

paulcole wrote: post #67
ElfinTrousers wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Deuterium" is uncountable, I'd challenge "deuteriums".

You would be wrong: https://scrabble.merriam.com/finder/deuteriums

OK I see it now, one could say e.g. "the fine artisinal deuteriums of Tibet, Tahiti, and Terre Haute".

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#88

Post by kamilm »

gillesjacobs wrote: post #49
kamilm wrote: post #45

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…

That's a really nice front-end! Really good code structure and dev practices too to my JS-nooby eye at least. 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…

> GADDAGs are really cool, +2x faster lookup

This is awesome, I'm surely going to try this. Thank you.

> I am working on a project for reinforcement learning for Scrabble, hoping to learn advanced strategies.

Is your project shared somewhere? I enjoy anything Scrabble-related.

> That's a really nice front-end! Really good code structure and dev practices too to my JS-nooby eye at least.

> When I need a front-end, I will definitely reference your project.

Happy to hear!

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#89

Post by iopq »

Tams80 wrote: post #42
iopq wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 assume 'ye' and an alternative to 'the' would be acceptable under those rules then?

I think it's already accepted as in "Hear ye"
Post reply on HN