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Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

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Re: Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

#51

Post by bdarnell »

Back in the day (2001) I worked on the PalmOS version of Scrabble. One thing that surprised me when I was tuning the AI was that it played better when all words of seven or more letters were removed from its vocabulary. Apparently searching through the longer words was a worse use of time than searching for other placements of shorter words (except on the highest difficulty, where it was given a larger time budget).

We ended up giving the lower difficulty levels a restricted dictionary anyway, but this was to affect players' perception of the difficulty rather than the actual difficulty (the AI on "beginner" mode shouldn't be playing a lot of words you've never heard of). We adjusted time budgets so that difficulty still ramped up as the dictionary expanded at higher levels.

Re: Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

#52

Post by varjag »

corin_ wrote: post #28
794CD01 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even South Africa?

I can't think of any time I've thought of or heard someone speaking of South Africa as a western country. Influenced by the West, sure.

Honestly I hardly heard anyone referring Venezuela or Cuba as the West either. In practice it's really down to Anglo-Saxon + European first world countries.

Re: Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

#53

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

absolutenumber wrote: post #50
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK you guys. Here's the serious bit then: >> McKay probably saw this as a bit of a holiday, while the Nigerians saw it as work. That's probably his way of unwinding and managing his psychology after a match. It's a bit misleading for the article to bring it up as a disadvantage since he's obviously a strong player who has probably competed for some time, so he should be expected to know what works for him. Also, you…

Stop.Just stop.You guys always begrudge success when Africans do good things.It is pathetic and low.You ought to learn to appreciate and celebrate people when they work hard to achieve success rather looking for ways to belittle their achievements.

Did you post this under the wrong message? I didn't write anything that sounds like I'm begrudging the Nigerians their victory.

Re: Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

#55

Post by hammock »

arcticfox wrote: post #15
sixhobbits wrote: post #6

"Nigeria is beating the West at its own board game" I know that the definition of "the West" is pretty vague, but this journalism seems a decade or two behind its time with its "us and them" style. Scrabble doesn't belong to Europe/USA and Nigeria fits geographically, politically, economically, and religiously into common definitions of "the West".

Scrabble quite literally was invented by and belongs to an American company. And you're basically just asking for the definition of "the West" to be rewritten for some reason: - culturally, I think it's a disservice to Nigeria to call it "Western", which usually means descended from the European tradition. Nigerians have their own ancient history, whereas direct descendants of European immigrants (e.g. most Americans…

Was actually invented by an American man who sold it to an American company.

Re: Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

#56

Post by hola_hola »

absolutenumber wrote: post #50
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK you guys. Here's the serious bit then: >> McKay probably saw this as a bit of a holiday, while the Nigerians saw it as work. That's probably his way of unwinding and managing his psychology after a match. It's a bit misleading for the article to bring it up as a disadvantage since he's obviously a strong player who has probably competed for some time, so he should be expected to know what works for him. Also, you…

Stop.Just stop.You guys always begrudge success when Africans do good things.It is pathetic and low.You ought to learn to appreciate and celebrate people when they work hard to achieve success rather looking for ways to belittle their achievements.

You are projecting your personal issues into this conversation. Nobody has done what you just said.

Re: Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

#57

Post by s_m_t »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #29
arcticfox wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scrabble quite literally was invented by and belongs to an American company. And you're basically just asking for the definition of "the West" to be rewritten for some reason: - culturally, I think it's a disservice to Nigeria to call it "Western", which usually means descended from the European tradition. Nigerians have their own ancient history, whereas direct descendants of European immigrants (e.g. most Americans…

- religiously, Nigeria is >50% Muslim. You know, I might be misreading this but I think you mean Western society is, by contrast, Christian. The West has made a big todo about being secular on a national level, regardless of what the population believes or does not believe. In some countries, the people are also largely a-religious. There's culture war, check, but to say that a nation's religion plays any role in whe…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world

>The concept of the Western part of the earth has its roots in Greco-Roman civilization in Europe, and the advent of Christianity.[2][3][4][5][6] In the modern era, Western culture has been heavily influenced by the traditions of the Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Age of Enlightenment—and shaped by the expansive colonialism of the 15th-20th centuries. Before the Cold War era, the traditional Western viewpoint identified Western Civilization with the Western Christian (Catholic-Protestant) countries and culture.

>Christianity remains the dominant religion in the Western world, where 70% are Christians.[38]

Re: Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

#58

Post by polpo »

chime wrote: post #4

If I understand this correctly, they are applying the Chess strategy of thinking n-moves ahead to Scrabble, where the opponent's tiles are hidden and ones own future tiles are mostly unknown. If you use all the tiles, on the upside you get +50 extra points. The downside is that you leave a lot more room for the opponent to score big since there are more letters on board after your move. Also, you have no control on y…

Quackle[1] and Elise[2], two of the best Scrabble AIs, do look ahead.

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/doc/how_quackle_... [2] http://www.codehappy.net/elise/

Re: Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

#60

Post by dfan »

This article slightly overstates how disruptive the strategy is. Of course top-level Scrabble players already knew about rack management and defensive plays, and would not always just greedily play the highest-scoring word. It's more a question of finding the optimal weightings of the different elements, and the Nigerians have shown that the conventional wisdom was probably weighted too highly towards making big plays immediately.
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