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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

#71

Post by jessriedel »

asdfologist wrote: post #70
jessriedel wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) It seems to me like a restricted dictionary or smaller time budget (or, for that matter, dumber search algorithms) are all sensible measures of a low difficul…

I think you missed the point that a restricted dictionary actually increased the difficulty to the user.

I don't think so? The restricted dictionary is for the AI, not the user.

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

#72

Post by asdfologist »

jessriedel wrote: post #71
asdfologist wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point that a restricted dictionary actually increased the difficulty to the user.

I don't think so? The restricted dictionary is for the AI, not the user.

"it played better when all words of seven or more letters were removed from its vocabulary."

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

#74

Post by thaumasiotes »

DanBC wrote: post #32
iopq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

economically? GDP - per capita $1091.64

Are you talking about Niger, not Nigeria? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP... Nigeria has a GDP per capita of about $6100. Have I misunderstood that page? Not that far off some EU countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu... Country CIA[4] 2010 Estimation Moldova 1,433 Kosovo 1,813 Bosnia and Herzegovina 3,500 Albania 4,000 Ukraine 4,350 Republic of Macedonia…

I'll reproduce the URLs you're giving in full, so that the invalid comparison becomes obvious:

wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita

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

#75

Post by jessriedel »

asdfologist wrote: post #72
jessriedel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so? The restricted dictionary is for the AI, not the user.

"it played better when all words of seven or more letters were removed from its vocabulary."

Oh, I see what you mean now. Thanks, I think you're right.

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

#76

Post by semi-extrinsic »

varjag wrote: post #52
corin_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same goes for North vs South. There is a funny quote by a US president (that I can't seem to find right now) listing some countries in the southern hemisphere, and they're all actually on the northern hemisphere.

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

#77

Post by cdelsolar »

I'm a tournament Scrabble player and while I'm glad this article has brought some awareness to our game, this is pretty standard tournament strategy. It's about balancing your rack and playing short words when needed. If you have a long word that uses all your letters, it is 99% of the time the right play.

The only reason why he passed up the bingo PEREIRAS in that endgame is because it would have emptied the bag and if his opponent had a bingo to end the game, Jighere would have lost.

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

#78

Post by hardlianotion »

drcode wrote: post #61
hardlianotion wrote: post #31

As a Nigerian, this makes me absurdly proud. As a mathematician, I am especially proud of the game-theoretic aspect of the win.

I'm curious though by your characterization of this as being "game theoretic"... It seems like this strategy is a consequence of correctly analyzing the game state tree, which doesn't on the face of it seem to involve game theory to me (in the way that term is usually used in economics.)

They are treating this as a stochastic game. They are accounting for their opponent's likely response when deciding their own move. That is enough for me, anyway.

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

#79

Post by Lordarminius »

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…

I fail to see why YeGoblynQueene is being downvoted. I was under the impression that the downvote button was to be used for posts that do not contribute to the discussion or are inflammatory etc. His contribution is relevant despite being wrong.

In the climate of political correctness many truths get swept under the table. The west IS Christian in outlook and structure. Its laws, mores,history are all derived from a Greco-Roman tradition filtered through a sieve of Christianity. It may be that some people wish to change the outlook to a philosophy of secularism but note that even this opposition bases its attack against a religous 'enemy'.

Bertrand Russells book -A History of Western Civilization should make very clear to anyone where certain ideas are derived from.

And yes. It may suck to you but the fact is that the perception of westerners is as an alliance of (lapsed!) Christian Nations.

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

#80

Post by thoth »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #45
imgabe wrote: post #43

I've been playing Words with Friends more or less constantly for the past 5 years or so and I've come to pretty much the same conclusion. It's far more important to deny your opponent the opportunity to get valuable triple/double letter or work scores than it is to always grab them yourself. If you do extend to get a bonus tile, make sure the potential scoring opportunity is limited. Things like: 1. Don't leave a vow…

WWF forces you to focus more on the board strategy due to the mechanics of the game being different than Scrabble: the player doesn't have to actually know and/or memorize the words they are playing, they can just attempt as many high scoring combinations they want until they get a hit in the game's dictionary database.

I use this strategy when playing WWF as well, and have stumbled across words unknown to me.

I also play illegal words to check the validity of other words formed. For instance, if I wonder whether an existing word can take an -S or -D ending, I'll play a word I know is wrong. WWF helpfully comes back with a list of which words aren't valid. :)

Neither of these work against a live opponent so I play WWF a lot differently than Scrabble. Like you said, strategy is different when playing - in WWF, I can focus more on rack management and scoring spaces playing WWF; in Scrrabble, I am nudged towards playing words I know because I can't test them. Back when I played Scrabble I studied the 2 and 3 letter works plus the hooks and didn't find that aspect of the game all that fun.

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