Blabrecs | Hacker News Reader

Blabrecs

mkremins.github.io

66 pointsxingyzt17 comments

This is cool! I have a similar game I play with friends called GUCHAT. Same game - nonsense words on a Scrabble board. But everyone has to approve your word. (And you do get a chance to defend the word if there is pushback.)

Neat to see the concept extended. And perhaps others out there are playing variations of this under different names...

Another game from the author:

https://mkremins.itch.io/starfreighter

Though entirely different than this one; it's about procedural generated storylets. Personally, I love this combination of buzzwords.

That's cool! Clever idea, really like a bunch of early computer games I played.

I love this idea but I’m disappointed by the execution. The name is a nonsensical anagram of the original so I thought those would be fair game, but nearly all the ones I tried were rejected. Maybe I’m not “getting it” well enough to play?

Tacking on a common suffix (-ish, -ed, etc.) seems to help.

Okay that I can work with. I also had more luck using real words and just substituting other vowels.

Most anagrams of English words don't themselves look like English words, so anagrams are not really a very fruitful way to find words that this algorithm will accept.

The real trick is to use common letter and vowel combinations, combined in ways which by happenstance don't correspond to actual words. Off the top of my head, I just generated BRECK, LUND, and ALOUGHT, all of which the AI accepted.

EDIT: Another fruitful strategy is words with common Greek or Latinate suffixes, mashed together at random. I just got ANACHROSIS and PERILATION. This seems to be particularly fruitful for generating long words for people looking to make those 50 point plays.

It liked "scrabeloid", for whatever it's worth (several points in scrabble!).

>> CROMULENT

> looks good to me!

Works pretty well, as far as I can tell.

Edit: yes, "EMBIGGEN" works as well.

Edit 2: "COVID" works, while "COVI" doesn't. "VIRUST" needs a meaning. "SOLIPSITUDING" really doesn't.

Looks like it's closely correlated with the levenshtein distance (number of single character differences).

needs more training?

FOOBAR: no way thats a word!

Google: About 9,920,000 results (0.42 seconds)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar

Not in a dictionary that would be okay for scrabble I guess

It's fond of "in", "on", "ing", "tion", etc. QUO is not allowed. DINATINANITANID is allowed.

Seems to be a bit of a major bug if it considers two-letter words to be "that's too short to be a word!".

Indeed, two letter words are vitally important in scrabble, and hence in Blabrecs

The fact that blabrecs isn't an allowed non-word is disappointing.

It says that "blabrecs" is a better sounding version of the original word "brablecs", which IS accepted

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