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Word Up
theodp writes "Depending on your perspective, the National Scrabble Championship is a major sporting event, an unrivalled intellectual competition, or the world's biggest dork-fest. So says Slate's Dan Wachtell, who turned to an anagram-drilling Unix program to gain an edge on the 850+ competitors. While hardly mainstream, competitive Scrabble is getting newfound attention thanks to the publication of Word Freak and release of Word Wars."
... And the CSI episode Bad Words
The fellow @ www.themaninblue.com has an excellent javascript/dhtml version available online.
;)
see here
I just stumbled upon it the other day, looking for ways to practice to beat my mother-in-law
There are much better words out there, though - /.'ers, what are your suggestions?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The best online scrabble can be found at Internet Scrabble Club. Usually several hundred or more players online at any given time from around the world. Multiple dictionaries from several languages and even a UK British dictionary. Very fun, playable from Linux and MacOSX via a Java applet (in the browser?), elsewise a quick download of a java applet for Windows. Many very highly rated national and international players are playing right now.
From the website:
The ISC is the best place on the Internet to play Scrabble in a relaxed friendly environment. You can compete at your own level in English, French, Romanian, Italian, or Dutch while meeting new people and making friends from around the world.
Right now there are 2138 players logged into the ISC and 792 games in progress.
Isaiah 43:19 (NCV)
Look at the new thing I am going to do. It is already happening. Don't you see it?
HERE
At the top of the article is a small menu with days of the week. Click on 'Mon' or http://slate.com/id/2105210/entry/2105211/. Took me a bit to find it too.
In response to RE and LA being words, that's because they're on the music scale or something like that. DO, RE, ME, FA, SO, LA, and TI are all also words. And if you use or someone else uses them, you can pretty easily add onto them(E.G. RE one turn, then add QUIRE onto it, and that's two turns) and then you can rack up some big points.
/Me is a closet Scrabble nerd
http://www.thepixiepit.co.uk/scrabble/index.htm
You mean like
http://www.a2zwordfinder.com/main.html
?
|>oug
That was the 2003 Scrabble All*Stars. The event Dan is writing about, the 2004 National Championship, will be shown on ESPN in October. At least as long as I can stop reading this thread and return to helping work on the postproduction. Speaking of which, this time around, we have the ESPN crew who did the World Series of Poker working with us, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing the final product.
By the way, if you want to see how Dan did at the NSC, or play through dozens of top-level games, check out the (shameless plug) event web site. Archived coverage of last year's All*Stars is also still available.
John Chew, Webmaster, www.scrabbleassociation.com
There's at least one implementation of all this stuff on Sourceforge: xwords.sourceforge.net. It includes DAWG-building tools in perl and apps in C for Linux (GTK or ncurses), PocketPCs and Palms.
two:
quixotic
In fact, quixotic implements a more complex datastructure than a DAWG, called a GADDAG which allows exceedingly fast word building, starting in the middle of the word. This means that if you also have a list of all the anchor squares -- those squares where playing a tile automatically makes a syntactically valid play -- you can generate all possible plays given a rack without ever generating an illegal play.
My 800MHz powerbook finds moves fast enough that it's feasible to do a couple of plys of a form of speculative minmax in order to evaluate the worth of particular board positions.
There's a very clever method of optimising the repeated valid placement calculations, due to Jacobson and Appel, where each square is tagged with the set of valid crossing letters that can be played on it. For example, if your board looked like:
1.2.3
A.N.D
L.O.O
E.W.E
where 1 2 and 3 were empty squares, 1 would be tagged with {bdeghkmprstvwy}, 2 with {aeks} and 3 with {}, so that a word played horizontally would be constrained to have only those letters in the tagged squares. (SOWPODS lexicon)
Combined with this is a refinement of the DAWG called a DAGGAD - in the author's words:
A practical variation is the DAWG for the language L = {REV(x)*y | xy is a word and x is not empty}, where * is just a delimiter. Each word in the lexicon can be generated starting from each letter in that word by placing tiles leftward
upon the board starting at an anchor square while traversing the corresponding arcs in the structure until encountering the *, and then placing tiles rightward from square to the right of the anchor square while still traversing corresponding arcs until acceptance. Being the reverse of the directed acyclic graph for prefixes followed by the directed acyclic graph for suffixes, I called it a GADDAG.
So for example, the word SPACE would be stored as SPACE, PACE*S, ACE*PS, CE*APS and E*CAPS, so that you could search the tree starting from the A, play C in the next square, E next, then jump back to the A, move back a square and play P, then back another square and play S. After the trie compaction, a DAGGAD takes up ~3-5 times the space of the corresponding DAWG, and roughly doubles the search speed.
Check out Graham Toal's wordgame programming page for lots more on scrabble algorithms.