"How could a company like Hasbro, hiring a company like EA mess up something that should be relatively easy to convert into a program."
Hasbro did not hire EA to do anything: Hasbro monetized some of the goodwill in its Scrabble brand by selling a long-term licence for electronic Scrabble products to EA.
If decision-makers at EA were clever, they would have just licensed Scrabulous, which was the first Scrabble server to manage to get it right, and appeal to expert and everyday players alike.
"I am not a programmer, but I would think that a game like Scrabble would be easy to make into an online game."
I am a programmer, and ran my own, um, generic crossword game server for many years, and can assure you that doing a good job of writing a Scrabble server is not at all easy, as evidenced by the fact that many have tried and so far only one has succeeded.
When I tried to impress my dad with instant messaging in the early 1980s (using either write(1) or talk(1)), he gently explained to me that this was just like what he and his Signal Corps buddies did in their spare time in the 1940s.
When correctly played, it turns out that it's a draw. The interactive game tree tool lets you explore which parts of the tree lead to which results, and if you start at the root, you can pick an edge at each node that guarantees at worst a draw for the current player. It's worth observing that the tree is not fully computed: it will often tell you that it doesn't know what happens if you make a given move in a given position, because all they needed to do was find a subtree that a player could always stay on.
"The software sees only roads"... that's a problem right there. I tried out the navigation system in a friend's Prius at Orient Point, Long Island, asking it how to get to New London, CT. It persisted in telling me I had to turn the car around and drive all the way around Long Island Sound until the ferry docked at New London and we drove back onto dry land again.
Re:Anagram-drilling Unix program
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Word Up
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choose the path which has the greatest difference in points between computer and opponent
Sounds obvious, but doesn't always work. Probability of winning correlates well with expected equity (net effect on difference in score at end of game), but there are situations that come up reasonably frequently where they rank candidate moves differently.
For instance, move A might give you a 10% chance of winning the game but every loss is a close one, while move B might give you a 20% chance of winning the game but all the losses are big. You'd generally want to pick move B on its winning percentage, not move A on its maximizing the expected value of your score minus opponent score.
Actual tournament situations get hairier. At the recent NSC, one player needed to win two straight games against the same opponent by a combined spread of at least 200 point to make it to the finals.
Re:Er, most scrabble freaks ARE girls
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According to the documentary Word Wars, competitive Scrabble players are 90% male
Word Wars is a fine film, but that's an exaggeration and a little out of context. Division 1 at the recent National Championship consists of those players who are competitive enough that they think they might be the best in the country. The average player in the group scores 390 points per game. 86% of them are men.
There are however six other divisions whose average score drops successively by roughly ten points. In Division 6 (340 and falling...), 69% of the players are women. And don't think that they're any less competitive!
You can, as soon as they make their way into one of the recognized (printed) source dictionaries. Hoover is good in Chambers, jimmy is good in several dictionaries. If you want to get slashdot into Merriam-Webster, start clipping whenever you see it used in print, and mail your clippings in to them. (Uh-oh, I have visions of their mailbag getting slashdotted...)
Re:Big point scrabble words...
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In Canada and the United States, it's the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, or its tournament equivalent, the Official Tournament and Club Word List.
In the rest of the world, it's currently Chambers (from which Official Scrabble Words is culled), but will soon change to Collins.
Which is why we don't play duplicate in English: we like the element of luck. Mind you, the "we" isn't monolithic. There's a sharp divide between North American players who like to bluff and insist that challenging an acceptable word should cost the challenger a turn, and the rest of the world where (for the most part) getting away with phoneys is considered underhanded, so challenging acceptable words incurs no penalty.
Well... given that top English players can still give Maven a run for its money, I think your anecdote says more for the quality of Dutch Scrabble players. The best English players have a history of decades of strategic theory development, excellent study tools and a pool of other top players to hone their skills against. And a lot of them practise against Maven all the time.
Brian's PhD thesis is a must-read for anyone interested in board game AI though, and is a fascinating description of the state of the art in Scrabble software.
Re:Yeah, I can play scrabble too...
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Look at the photos on the official site, see how many of those women you'd like to date.
The demographics for the National Championships are skewed in favour of people who have a serious enough commitment in the game to want to devote a week to a tournament. The median age at this event was 50 and only 10% were under 30.
That's not generally true of serious Scrabble though. I'm sure nubile women are overrepresented among online Scrabble players, and if you look at events like the National School Scrabble Championship, the players there are all underage.
Re:You can't spell that on television
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Word Up
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That's a bit of a misinterpretation of what happened. NSC Finalists Trey Wright and David Gibson had both agreed to play the best-of-five finals without using words that ESPN would not televise. In the heat of the moment, at this position, Trey forgot and played LEZ for 32 points. My wife, who was sitting beside him recording his plays, brought the word to the attention of the tournament directors, who spent a good ten minutes verifying that the correct course of action was to set everything (clocks, tiles, board) back the way it was before he made the play and let play continue from there.
Re:Scrabble...a sporting event?!?
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Word Up
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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.
Okay, so suppose you had SLASHDOT on your rack. Then if there were an F in the right spot, you could play HOLDFASTS through it for 212 points. And maybe get an extra turn when your opponent unsuccessfully challenged the word. But more likely, they'd ask you why you had eight tiles on your rack instead of seven, and you'd lose your turn instead.
Re:Big point scrabble words...
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Word Up
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· Score: 2, Informative
Antidisestablishmentarianism?
Nope. Scores zero, because the Scrabble board is only fifteen letters wide. That wouldn't even fit on one of the new Super Scrabble boards. The highest scoring word in the tournament lexicon is OXYPHENBUTAZONE, which could score 1778 points under a rather unlikely set of circumstances.
Right answer, wrong reason. Two-letter words are the building blocks of Scrabble because they're how you make parallel plays. To take an extreme example, suppose your opponent opens the game with the word "ABALONE" and you have "DYNAMOS" sitting on your rack. Where do you play it for the most points? You could hook the S to make ABALONES and DYNAMOS for 83 points, but you'd score 16 more points if you knew your two-letter words well enough to lay the word right underneath, making AD, BY, AN, LA, OM, NO and ES. The extra points come from the fact that you score each word and crossword that you make, and here eight words score more than two.
Extending RE to make QUI-RE scores only for QUIRE. If you can fit QUIRE parallel to a word beginning with an R, making the crossword RE, you'll score for both QUIRE and RE.
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'.
Playing Scrabble at a high level involves memorizing a large portion of the dictionary. Some Luddites do successfully do this without study software, but it's definitely the harder path to follow.
Re:Not a sport, but...
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Word Up
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· Score: 2, Informative
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.
Mantis shrimp have at least eleven different receptors, and lots of birds and fish have four or five. So I guess it's the logical direction to go once the human market for RGB monitors reaches saturation.
Slashdot Mirror
So, they're *34,001* years old. Get your story straight!
Was anyone else living in a timeline where Siemens didn't make hearing aids in the 1920s until yesterday?
"How could a company like Hasbro, hiring a company like EA mess up something that should be relatively easy to convert into a program."
Hasbro did not hire EA to do anything: Hasbro monetized some of the goodwill in its Scrabble brand by selling a long-term licence for electronic Scrabble products to EA.
If decision-makers at EA were clever, they would have just licensed Scrabulous, which was the first Scrabble server to manage to get it right, and appeal to expert and everyday players alike.
"I am not a programmer, but I would think that a game like Scrabble would be easy to make into an online game."
I am a programmer, and ran my own, um, generic crossword game server for many years, and can assure you that doing a good job of writing a Scrabble server is not at all easy, as evidenced by the fact that many have tried and so far only one has succeeded.
When I tried to impress my dad with instant messaging in the early 1980s (using either write(1) or talk(1)), he gently explained to me that this was just like what he and his Signal Corps buddies did in their spare time in the 1940s.
When correctly played, it turns out that it's a draw. The interactive game tree tool lets you explore which parts of the tree lead to which results, and if you start at the root, you can pick an edge at each node that guarantees at worst a draw for the current player. It's worth observing that the tree is not fully computed: it will often tell you that it doesn't know what happens if you make a given move in a given position, because all they needed to do was find a subtree that a player could always stay on.
"The software sees only roads"... that's a problem right there. I tried out the navigation system in a friend's Prius at Orient Point, Long Island, asking it how to get to New London, CT. It persisted in telling me I had to turn the car around and drive all the way around Long Island Sound until the ferry docked at New London and we drove back onto dry land again.
choose the path which has the greatest difference in points between computer and opponent
Sounds obvious, but doesn't always work. Probability of winning correlates well with expected equity (net effect on difference in score at end of game), but there are situations that come up reasonably frequently where they rank candidate moves differently.
For instance, move A might give you a 10% chance of winning the game but every loss is a close one, while move B might give you a 20% chance of winning the game but all the losses are big. You'd generally want to pick move B on its winning percentage, not move A on its maximizing the expected value of your score minus opponent score.
Actual tournament situations get hairier. At the recent NSC, one player needed to win two straight games against the same opponent by a combined spread of at least 200 point to make it to the finals.
According to the documentary Word Wars, competitive Scrabble players are 90% male
Word Wars is a fine film, but that's an exaggeration and a little out of context. Division 1 at the recent National Championship consists of those players who are competitive enough that they think they might be the best in the country. The average player in the group scores 390 points per game. 86% of them are men.
There are however six other divisions whose average score drops successively by roughly ten points. In Division 6 (340 and falling...), 69% of the players are women. And don't think that they're any less competitive!
You can, as soon as they make their way into one of the recognized (printed) source dictionaries. Hoover is good in Chambers, jimmy is good in several dictionaries. If you want to get slashdot into Merriam-Webster, start clipping whenever you see it used in print, and mail your clippings in to them. (Uh-oh, I have visions of their mailbag getting slashdotted...)
In Canada and the United States, it's the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, or its tournament equivalent, the Official Tournament and Club Word List.
In the rest of the world, it's currently Chambers (from which Official Scrabble Words is culled), but will soon change to Collins.
This way, no more chance factor!
Which is why we don't play duplicate in English: we like the element of luck. Mind you, the "we" isn't monolithic. There's a sharp divide between North American players who like to bluff and insist that challenging an acceptable word should cost the challenger a turn, and the rest of the world where (for the most part) getting away with phoneys is considered underhanded, so challenging acceptable words incurs no penalty.
Well... given that top English players can still give Maven a run for its money, I think your anecdote says more for the quality of Dutch Scrabble players. The best English players have a history of decades of strategic theory development, excellent study tools and a pool of other top players to hone their skills against. And a lot of them practise against Maven all the time.
Brian's PhD thesis is a must-read for anyone interested in board game AI though, and is a fascinating description of the state of the art in Scrabble software.
Look at the photos on the official site, see how many of those women you'd like to date.
The demographics for the National Championships are skewed in favour of people who have a serious enough commitment in the game to want to devote a week to a tournament. The median age at this event was 50 and only 10% were under 30.
That's not generally true of serious Scrabble though. I'm sure nubile women are overrepresented among online Scrabble players, and if you look at events like the National School Scrabble Championship, the players there are all underage.
That's a bit of a misinterpretation of what happened. NSC Finalists Trey Wright and David Gibson had both agreed to play the best-of-five finals without using words that ESPN would not televise. In the heat of the moment, at this position, Trey forgot and played LEZ for 32 points. My wife, who was sitting beside him recording his plays, brought the word to the attention of the tournament directors, who spent a good ten minutes verifying that the correct course of action was to set everything (clocks, tiles, board) back the way it was before he made the play and let play continue from there.
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.
Okay, so suppose you had SLASHDOT on your rack. Then if there were an F in the right spot, you could play HOLDFASTS through it for 212 points. And maybe get an extra turn when your opponent unsuccessfully challenged the word. But more likely, they'd ask you why you had eight tiles on your rack instead of seven, and you'd lose your turn instead.
Antidisestablishmentarianism?
Nope. Scores zero, because the Scrabble board is only fifteen letters wide. That wouldn't even fit on one of the new Super Scrabble boards. The highest scoring word in the tournament lexicon is OXYPHENBUTAZONE, which could score 1778 points under a rather unlikely set of circumstances.
Right answer, wrong reason. Two-letter words are the building blocks of Scrabble because they're how you make parallel plays. To take an extreme example, suppose your opponent opens the game with the word "ABALONE" and you have "DYNAMOS" sitting on your rack. Where do you play it for the most points? You could hook the S to make ABALONES and DYNAMOS for 83 points, but you'd score 16 more points if you knew your two-letter words well enough to lay the word right underneath, making AD, BY, AN, LA, OM, NO and ES. The extra points come from the fact that you score each word and crossword that you make, and here eight words score more than two.
Extending RE to make QUI-RE scores only for QUIRE. If you can fit QUIRE parallel to a word beginning with an R, making the crossword RE, you'll score for both QUIRE and RE.
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'.
Playing Scrabble at a high level involves memorizing a large portion of the dictionary. Some Luddites do successfully do this without study software, but it's definitely the harder path to follow.
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
the human eye only has receptors for R, G, and B
Mantis shrimp have at least eleven different receptors, and lots of birds and fish have four or five. So I guess it's the logical direction to go once the human market for RGB monitors reaches saturation.
Ashi Shimbun? Is someone pulling my leg?