Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles • Hacker News Board

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#51

Post by jlewis_st » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 5:13 PM UTC

nathell wrote: post #35

Little known is the fact that Butts actually did some manual fine-tuning of the frequencies he obtained from NYTimes. E.g., he decreased the number of S's to four in order to mitigate its affixability to almost every singular noun and enhance the gameplay.

I did simple analysis of overall letter frequency and how that would map to a 98 tile set (not counting the blanks) and this is what I got:

A: 7 B: 2 C: 4 D: 3 E: 11 F: 1 G: 3 H: 2 I: 8 J: 1 K: 1 L: 5 M: 3 N: 6 O: 6 P: 3 Q: 1 R: 7 S: 9 T: 6 U: 3 V: 1 W: 1 X: 1 Y: 2 Z: 1

It makes a lot of sense to reduce the number of Ss for the sake of gameplay, and it seems like Butts redistributed those extra tiles amongst the vowels.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#52

Post by RyJones » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 11:23 PM UTC

dfan wrote: post #46

RyJones wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess en passant is more surprising to neophytes than castling

Yeah, I was actually going to use en passant, but I figured more people would understand the comment if I used castling.

They're both outside the norm enough. I remember the first time en passant was used on me (4th or 5th grade?), I thought it was made up.

If you want to start an argument, stop someone from castling through check.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#53

Post by zem » Tue, Jan 01, 2013, 12:46 AM UTC

jlewis_st wrote: post #49

zem wrote: post #8

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…

Interesting, hooking could argue for weighting letters at the beginning or end of 3+-letter words higher than those in the middle.

it's pretty easy to just explicitly say "if word is hook able" and "if word is a hook", since you have the whole dictionary to hand

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#54

Post by opk » Tue, Jan 01, 2013, 10:03 AM UTC

One advantage of using the NY Times over the full OSPD for determining letter scores is that it gives precedence to words that people know and use. Casual players don't memorise lists of two letter words. Having imperfect letter scores adds an element of luck to the game which can make it more fun.