Scrabble's Best Player Knows No Limits
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Scrabble's Best Player Knows No Limits
1–6 of 6 posts
Re: Scrabble's Best Player Knows No Limits
#2I recommend "Word Freak" by Stefan Fatsis if you're looking for a non-fiction novel about the world of competitive Scrabble. It's one of the most entertaining and well-written books I've ever read. Almost impossible to put down once you've started it.
Re: Scrabble's Best Player Knows No Limits
#3> He is widely believed to have memorized the entire international-English Scrabble lexicon, more than 280,000 words
Definitely helps.
> Nigel extended ZAP to ZAPATEADOS
My problem is I try to extend the word rather than create new words. So I'd look for zapped, unzapped, zapping, etc. Actually, if I had 'ATEADOS', I would waste my time looking for a 7 letter word ending in S.
> Nigel placed all of his letters between the P and TED, spelling out PERNOCTATED and turning NON into ANON. The play tallied 92 points.
Now that is genuinely impressive.
I wish scrabble had platforms as widely available and free as chess does.
Re: Scrabble's Best Player Knows No Limits
#4I recommend "Word Freak" by Stefan Fatsis if you're looking for a non-fiction novel about the world of competitive Scrabble. It's one of the most entertaining and well-written books I've ever read. Almost impossible to put down once you've started it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0142002267
Stefan Fatsis also being the author of this article, so if you've read the article you've already gotten a preview of his writing style. (Just mentioning in case someone hadn't put that together.)
Re: Scrabble's Best Player Knows No Limits
#5> He is widely believed to have memorized the entire international-English Scrabble lexicon, more than 280,000 words Definitely helps. > Nigel extended ZAP to ZAPATEADOS My problem is I try to extend the word rather than create new words. So I'd look for zapped, unzapped, zapping, etc. Actually, if I had 'ATEADOS', I would waste my time looking for a 7 letter word ending in S. > Nigel placed all of his letters betwee…
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Re: Scrabble's Best Player Knows No Limits
#6This article talks a lot about Nigel being better than AI. Is that true? It seems that with a quarter million words and a fairly limited search space a bot would pretty easily be able to find the best word for any play. It might get a bit more complicated if you are also planning for future moves but it still seems like a bot should be able to out-play the best humans pretty easily.
Don't get me wrong, Nigel's skills are hugely impressive. But I feel this AI talk was more pandering to the current hype than and actual claim that he was better than a computer solver.