11–20 of 54 posts
2-letter Scrabble words are more offensive than curse words, and anyone who insists on them deserves only two: "F" and "U".
Sorry, they're part of the game. It's like getting offended at a chess player for castling.
It's reasonable for someone with good reasoning or a large vocabulary to find it distasteful that they lose consistently simply because they haven't memorized the 1,000 most common moves.[0] In chess, this is pretty much built into the mechanics of the game, but it's easy to fix in Scrabble with a simple house rule: Don't use bullshit words.
It's only part of the game if you let it be.
[0] I'll give an illustrative example. The official Scrabble dictionary[1] lists "re" with the definition "the second tone of the diatonic musical scale". Just so for the other sounds of diatonic solfeggio that everyone knows: re, mi, fa, sol, la, and ti. All of these, according to Hasbro, are English words, with plurals.
We're all descriptivists here, that's fine. But did you ever wonder why there are only seven words for the diatonic scale, but actually twelve tones in an octave? Or why re, mi, and fa have different vowel sounds? The answer is that solfege has a way to verbalize accidentals (notes not in the key) or non-diatonic scales by modulating the vowel sound. A raised do is a di; a lowered re is a ra. So you can easily pronounce a chromatic scale beginning at do: do, di/ra, re, ri/me, mi, fa, fi/se, sol, si/le, la, li/te, ti, do. (The syllable used depends on the key.)
Go ahead, look up any of those accidental syllables in the dictionary. La and le: Both French articles, both solfeggio syllables. Only one is a Scrabble word. You can't say that's not stupid.
2-letter Scrabble words are more offensive than curse words, and anyone who insists on them deserves only two: "F" and "U".
Sorry, they're part of the game. It's like getting offended at a chess player for castling.
Right off the bat, you need to pick a set of words that are allowed. Tournaments play, of course, allow a small set of those odd two letter words. However, both sides have to agree on a word set up front. it's perfectly reasonable to pick a dictionary that doesn't recognize "za" as a real word for pizza. However, i think if transfire really wants to use "fu", he'd have to resort to urban dictionary for the word list. That also admits za, so it's kind of a lose lose there.
"More broadly, I think Valett can provide the foundation for answering other interesting questions in word games, such as how to quantify the difficulty of Boggle boards." Well, you can already quantify the difficulty of Boggle boards pretty well just by counting up all the points you can make on them (it's a small enough problem that you can do that pretty fast). I think the topology of the board is important enough…
I was thinking that you could sum up the transition probabilities from the actual transitions available on the board as the main measure. Then you could use frequency by length to weight legal Boggle plays (3/4 letters and up, so 2-letter words wouldn't even count). You're right that with a Boggle board you could just count up the available Boggle points by finding all the possible words, but that might miss some asp…
as a competitive scrabble player, one mistake that I think he might have made is overweighting corpus-based probability versus game playability. his transition-in and transition-out weights are a good start, but there's also the fact that n+1 letter words that can be made by "hooking" (adding a single letter before or after) n letter words are far more useful than those that cannot. also the layout of the premium squ…
Maybe you and the OP should petition the Words With Friends people to give you a statistically significant data-dump of real games so you can analyze and revalue the letters. It would be a service to us all.
There would be a lot of factors to consider that might make it hard to apply to re-valuing Scrabble, though:
1. Most Words With Friends play is casual, and casual players are likely to play very differently than competitive players.
2. The data would show you what words players play given the current scoring system, and wouldn't necessarily translate to another scoring system.
3. Words With Friends is a different game than Scrabble (different board layout, different bingo scoring, different number of tiles and different tile frequency).
4. Players end up playing the majority of the tiles they draw, so the frequency with which they play a letter may have a closer relationship to how many of the printed tiles have that letter than it is to the frequency of the letter in the corpus.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, they're part of the game. It's like getting offended at a chess player for castling.
I'd guess en passant is more surprising to neophytes than castling
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you and the OP should petition the Words With Friends people to give you a statistically significant data-dump of real games so you can analyze and revalue the letters. It would be a service to us all.
That would be really interesting data to look at. There would be a lot of factors to consider that might make it hard to apply to re-valuing Scrabble, though: 1. Most Words With Friends play is casual, and casual players are likely to play very differently than competitive players. 2. The data would show you what words players play given the current scoring system, and wouldn't necessarily translate to another scorin…
2-letter Scrabble words are more offensive than curse words, and anyone who insists on them deserves only two: "F" and "U".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, they're part of the game. It's like getting offended at a chess player for castling.
I'd guess en passant is more surprising to neophytes than castling
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking that you could sum up the transition probabilities from the actual transitions available on the board as the main measure. Then you could use frequency by length to weight legal Boggle plays (3/4 letters and up, so 2-letter words wouldn't even count). You're right that with a Boggle board you could just count up the available Boggle points by finding all the possible words, but that might miss some asp…
If you had enough real games data you could see how often a word is found when present and use that is a weighing factor. Although the arrangement if a word might also impact the likelihood to be found.
The game would end when all players had two few tiles to play.