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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."
I like Scrabble so much, I keep running down the battery on my PDA playing the scrabble-like game on it. It gave me the low battery warning this morning so I had to read during lunch.
I'll give these a look though, particularly Word Wars as even AVP wasn't as exciting as most alternative film is. Truth has a habit of being far more interesting than fiction, what with the boring repetitiveness of formula cinema.
To Scrabble beginners, here's some advice: Make the best of the least letters. High scores can be achieved with 2 and 3 letter words and leave fewer openings for opponents. Study the Scrabble dictionary between games. RE, LA, NU are words ;-)
When I heard that the end of wooden tiles was coming, I dashed down to the local game shop and scored one of those sets. I can't imagine playing this with plastic bits, not after my dad taught me the game ages ago. Call me tradition bound.
Dork certainly is a fitting description of someone who turns to a computer to help them with words. It's a game of pitting intellect vs intellect, not intellect vs 'Fred'*.
* Fred is a cycling term for wannabe, but with a strongly negative connotation
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Unix Program to play scrabble? That seems like overkill. Plus it would really make the game pointless for other players.
L
B O R I N G
S
P A T H E T I C
R
S A D N E S S
While we are talking about word fest and such, don't forget the National Spelling Bee
:D
ESPN telecasts and I always watch it
Its pretty entertaining actually in a nerdy kind of way. (Isn't that the reason we are all on slashdot!)
And Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy on ESPN) wrote an interesting diary too.
Free XBox, PS2
You know you've reached the top when Slashdot calls your "sporting" event a "dork-fest". There is no higher complement.
... And the CSI episode Bad Words
Will there be girls and nookie? Ohhh please please please...PLLLEEEASE.
Ok, I'm a techno geek at heart. But this, THIS is just sad. Hell, if you are looking for a place to sacrifice virgins, you couldn't find a better place.
Life is not for the lazy.
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?
Women tend to like word games more than men do. Scrabble competitions are mainly composed of housewives reinvigorated after a life of raising kids by this game.
It's what bridge used to be.
The problem is that these are saggy, married girls. *sigh*
I was taught some kid version of checkers, back in the day, and went on a family vacation to the Keewenau Peninsula (Eagle River, MI) where this whitehaired old hotel owner (The Swank Hotel -- his last name was Swank) was the county checkers champion. He schooled me and gave me no breaks. Never underestimate old men with board games, like checkers, chess, dominos or Scrabble, especially where they have months to pass (between tourist seasons) to hone their l33t sk1llz.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Duke- "Quyzbuk"
Marty-"That's not a word"
Duke - "(dials phone) Get Webster on the phone. Noah, how ya doing? It's Duke. How much would it cost to make Quyzbuk a word? (pause) I don't what means, uh, how about a big problem? Great! How about that other word I invented, Dukelicious? No ones using it? What a Duketastrophe."
It's always great to see the word sport devalued even more to where it is essentially a synonym with 'game.' Hemingway said "Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports ... all others are games." While he was an overrated fuck and there are probably a few things to add - nothing involving an otherwise inanimate ball - it is kind of sad that anything and everything is now called a sport. I guess we need to invent a new word to mean what sport used to mean.
Scrabble isn't a sport, but ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) had coverage of a Scrabble tournament once. They can make anything interesting. There seemed to be so much drama... the guy had his letters (which we could see), and there were only so many words he could make with them. It was really exciting.
It's the same reason that ESPN's hit such a nerve with World Series of Poker. What normally isn't that great to watch can be made a lot more fun when you're 1) in the know and 2) have overly excited and knowledgeable commentators guiding you through it.
I can only imagine what else they'd try to cover.
Bart: Here we go. Kwyjibo. [places his tiles] K-W-Y-J-I-B-O.
Twenty-two points, plus triple-word-score, plus fifty points
for using all my letters. Game's over. I'm outta here. [gets up]
Homer: [grabs Bart with his left hand, holding a banana in his right]
Wait a minute, you little cheater!
You're not going anywhere until you tell me what a kwyjibo is.
Bart: Kwyjibo. Uh... a big, dumb, balding North American ape. With no chin.
Marge: And a short temper.
Homer: I'll show you a big, dumb, balding ape! [leaps for Bart]
Bart: [making his escape] Uh oh. Kwyjibo on the loose!
$cat
cos ESPN don't like it
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Quoth the article:
I responded with GEY for 33 to go ahead 371-353. I have no idea what GEY means, in case you are wondering.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
ever tried playing scrabble of *only* technical words? Very interesting.
SLASHDOT = 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 4 + 2 + 1 + 1 = 12points
Now thats one of the lowest scoring words...
Right after the dodgeball championship on ESPN 8
Hmmm, I have 5 mod pts, its time to metamod, and on top of that I have to meta-metamod? When do I get to read slashdot?
Wouldn't a computerized Scrabble player have the potential to become unbeatable pretty easily?
Should we welcome our new, dictionary-using Unix overlords?
Liked ROC, myself, until an architect friend pulled ADZ on me .. the bastard!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Do you remember college? The arts classes you detested? Those classes enrolled humanities majors -- people who studied history, philosophy, theater, English literature -- you know, the people who used language and social skills to learn. Remember all the hotties in there? How eager they were to discuss Kant, feminism, and the impact of the Impressionist movement on French Romantic literature? Remember how insecure those girls made you feel?
Here's a hint: those girls knew how to play Scrabble. And read Lord Chatterley's Lover. Think of it as CounterStrike for people who can carry on a conversation.
(Oh, and Lord Chatterley's Lover is kind of like this weird encrypted ASCII porn. It, like, uses your imagination to generate images! And girls dig it!)
Why is anything that involves knowledge or thinking beyond "which reality show is on tonight?" described by name-calling?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
While hardly mainstream, competitive Scrabble is getting newfound attention
"Mainstream" was rendered obsolete when search engines were invented. There is no such thing as "mainstream" or "mass market" any more. Detergent is a mass market. Everything else is non-mainstream.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I guess I missed the part in the article about the anagram-drilling Unix program.
On that same not, how are computers at playing Scrabble anyway? I would think that they'd be pretty good at it, since they could just generate a list of potential anagrams, check them in a dictionary, and then use a maximize function which would search a couple moves deep for the best scoring path.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
I was in CS 1 class last semester, and this was the second program we did. We took a list of words (usually /usr/share/dict) and a set of tiles, and printed out words that matched, as well as their score. Really trivial stuff - any freshman CS undergrad could do it.
My fiancee and I played Scrabble every night, sometimes multiple times a night. And yes, we were fully aware of the nerd factor there.
When I proposed to her, it was via the ring in the tile bag.
I later found out that some crappy movie with JLo also had a Scrabble proposal in it, but I haven't seen said movie.
We play less Scrabble these days mainly due to less free time.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
It's not trivial... The tricky part is in the fast generation of valid scrabble words. This is made relatively quick by use of a TRIE or DAWG (Directed Acyclic Word Graph). Basically a DAWG is an efficient data structure where each letter of the alphabet is linked down to each subsequent letter that forms, or is on the way to forming, a valid scrabble word. Nodes where words are formed are marked as such. (Diff between a TRIE and a DAWG is that a DAWG is optimised so that all common endings (ING, ED etc) are stored once and pointed too, rather than a TRIE where it is not optimised.
This means that the lookup for any combination of characters on the board / in the rack is blazingly fast. Want to check the string 'getgstsd' for validity? Well, g passes, ge passes, get passes, getg... Bzzzzt. Wrong, no valid words down this path! Next please.
This is MUCH faster than a traditional binary search, and when you are checking typically thousands of existences per valid board location per move, it's worth it.
All this ignores the nasty recursive algorithms to identify valid placement options, considering that placing a word may create invalid words along the opposite axis - so any extra words created need to be checked for validity too.
I ended up writing a program to play scrabble and it used a feedback mechanism on several criteria (number of tiles used, place in game, ahead or behind status, number of premium squares used, number of premuim squares opened up etc) to weight future decisions. I'm a very good player and this program very quickly destroyed me. It was fascinating though to watch it play itself.
Back in the day it was running on a 486dx2/66 and took about 2 seconds per move so it was possible to watch the games develop.
I still have the code somewhere (in PASCAL!)... I really should break it back out and get it to compile on something new.
Cheers - N
I don't have a problem with the game of scrabble, and I can imagine playing it on a rainy afternoon if you're somewhere in the boonies, but what I DO have a problem with the scrabble culture!
First of all, these people set up dates to play scrabble and then they meet up. In other words, they're commited to playing scrabble on, say, Sunday at 3pm, even though it's finally not a rainy weekend and the boyfriend wants to go to the beach and chill out, but no, she has to go play scrabble because she has a scrabble appointment.
This is unhealthy. Like I said, nothing wrong with a game of scrabble on a rainy afternoon but when the weather is nice the last thing you should be doing is sitting on your ass with fucking letter tiles.
Second, it destroys your brain. These people see a bunch of letter barf and see some random word in it. A normal person sees AHIVDLWVDIJBE and these sickos go wow I can spell "INTERCONTINETAL" with that. Quintuple letter score. You're not supposed to think like that. You're supposed to see AHIVDLWVDIJBE and say "you know what FUCK THIS I am going to the beach"
Okay I guess I am a bit bitter because I am dating the international scrabble champ or whateverthefuck and it's cutting into my beach time.
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
The Scrabble tourney was in the news of the weird last week because someone legally played "LEZ" but had to take it back because the match was televised. At least he went on to win anyway.
"KWIJYBO... a big, fat, dumb ape with only 3 hairs on his head"
Eye all ways loose.
/. rieder wif ah spelang probablem.
Shirely eyem knot teh ownly
Elivs
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.
Whats next, basic math as an olympic sporting event?
Well, there is one Scrabble player who has won both the U.S. and Canadian National Championships, who was also a gold medallist at the International Mathematical Olympiad. But no, he's not big on sports.
I thought so at first, but consider the source of the insult. This is Slashdot, you have to toe the line and like what everyone else likes. Obviously many of the rubes who haunt this place aren't very well rounded people. They think spelling is unimportant. They love anime, Star Trek, LOTR, and acronyms.
Or perhaps this story is just following a trend I have noticed. Slight jabs within the posted story to "fire up" the discussion. After all, the people who post responses to the discussion make up the bulk of Slashdot's content. Without the discussion, there isn't much to see here. The diatribes, rants, quips, and flames are the fuel for further diatribes, rants, quips and flames. And the occasional informed post. I mean, just look at my first paragraph. You think that won't get a few responses? :) That is just how things work around here.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.