Many of the best Scrabble players are Thais who don't speak English (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Many of the best Scrabble players are Thais who don't speak English (2014)

thestar.com.my

48 pointsTomte16 comments

The champion of French Scrabble a couple years back was a New Zealander who didn't speak the language: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/...

This article appears to originally be from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/06/scrabb...

The site also features several other Guardian articles by the same author. Seems a little iffy?

The 'comment is free' section of the guardian is their freelancer/blog bit. What you're probably seeing is the same author being paid for the same piece from multiple sources. Not all that fishy, just the way freelancing works.

The 2017 National Scrabble Championships are going on now and you can follow along here:

http://event.scrabbleplayers.org/games/nsc2017/

Amusingly, not once does the article mention that it's about English-language Scrabble and not Thai-language Scrabble.

That would seem implied, otherwise why would this be an interesting story?

More recently, there was a lot of comment last year about the strength of Nigerian scrabble players, such as this : http://www.slate.com/articles/life/gaming/2016/05/have_niger...

As an abugida versus an alphabet, Thai and English are not that different in structural conception, though Thai has almost double the number of consonants.

Not that different in structural composition...? I don't follow what you mean. I do speak some Thai, too

The op means: the letters map vaguely to the sounds used to produce them.

Also speaking some Thai, I'm like you unsure this is any kind of useful insight. More useful would be that there's enough Latin alphabet signs in Thailand that all literate Thais can already sound-out English, even if they don't understand it.

I meant that it's not much of a conceptual jump for people with native literacy in abugidas to an English game like scrabble, since the writing system is already really rather similar.

and I guess because many of the words are not ones a native speaker would know anyway and are only learnt for the game.

If understanding isn't important, wouldn't a halfway decent AI kill most players in the game?

this is a fairly interesting question for you to ask.

i put it to you to think about how you can write a scrabble solver, if you're given the official word list. I don't think it's that much of a step up from a sudoku solver!

Yes, it would, and it does. Or not so much AI as brute force code. You can download a Scrabble cheating app on the iPhone right now.

Scrabble is an easily solved problem... No AI necessary, just brute force.

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