Slashdot Mirror
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
You know you've reached the top when Slashdot calls your "sporting" event a "dork-fest". There is no higher complement.
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?
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."
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
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.
Or, assuming you had one of the letters, say the 'L', on the board in the right spot, say the lower right hand of the board, this could end up as:
Which comes out to 144 points. Not too bad for slashdot!
Remember: In Scrabble, placement is everything.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
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