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Comment by jgw | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, that probably came out more snotty than it should have.

My beef with Scrabble is that it really isn't a word game, so much as an exercise in memorizing arbitrary strings of symbols. It's unfortunate, because it doesn't really encourage people to develop their vocabulary, as in "learning new words and their meanings", which is generally useful. Rather, it encourages people to learn what arbitrary combinations are legal in a given word list.

Ad absurdum - at one point, the world Scrabble champion was a fellow who didn't actually speak English.

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I'm a competitive Scrabble player. While you're absolutely correct that learning arbitrary strings of letters is a part of the game, this doesn't imply that developing one's vocabulary isn't.

As a result of the game, I've learned tons of words whose meanings are completely unknown to me (mbaqanga, eolipile, aboideau) and tons of words that have enhanced my vocabulary (prexy, glaire, oomiak).

Off topic, but I can't resist: the (a)eolipile is one of the coolest objects in history. It is literally the first steam-powered machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile . Its invention suggests that perhaps if things had gone a bit differently the Romans could have made steam power practical 1400 years before the Industrial Age.

Thanks, that's really sweet. Now I know this word indirectly because of Scrabble.

When you think about it, for any any Scrabble-like game to be played competitively, it'll ultimately have to have a codified word list. (Every word needs to be judged as legal or illegal.) Make that list too small and confined to "normal" vocabulary and you make the game vulnerable to being "solved" by players who can memorize everything and/or, you make the game less complex/interesting.

Make the list too large, and you open the game up precisely to the this sort of critique -- "it's all about learning arbitrary words like AA or ZEK." Personally, I'm happy with the latter, as it makes the game deep and rewarding (I actually enjoy looking up words like "zek.") But (competitive) Scrabble is its own world that needn't appeal to everyone.

If the arbitrariness of the Scrabble tournament word list bothers you, you might try house rules with your friends that limit words to those that are universally accepted. This is what I do when I play with my mom. I just know that I can't play QI or UNAU and play a less competitive, friendlier game.

While not as impressive as playing competitive Scrabble in a foreign language, I thought it was fascinating in the documentary about competitive Scrabble, Word Wars[1], that one of the finalists in an American tournament was a British champion who had to keep track of which words were allowed in the British Scrabble dictionary versus the American Scrabble dictionary used in the tournament.

[1]http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390632/

They should have some kind of "definition" challenge - if you don't know the definition of a word, you can't use it.

The trouble is nailing it down. You can't expect people to remember the dictionary definition word-for-word, but then how close is "close enough", and who decided? OTOH, if you just require people to use the word in a sentence, even ruling out variants like "I want to play the word "quux" next", all a player would have to do would be to remember that a word is, e.g. a noun, and say "I saw a xyzzy on the way to work yesterday."

That is incredible. I'm not really advocating that way of playing - I never really play a word I can't define. But I'm trying to justify an exception for the two-letter-words because they're so useful. They're a bit of a special case - knowing them keeps a game feeling enjoyable and flowing pleasantly.

As for 'learning new words and their meanings', clearly Scrabble isn't that game. But to be fair that isn't its stated aim, either. If you know any good examples I'd love to play them.

True - they're indispensable. I have a coworker who plays Scrabble at a competitive level and has memorized every 2, 3, 4 and 5 letter word in The Word List, and will randomly shout out, on hearing words like "tandoor", that there are 3 anagrams of it - tornado, odorant, and something else I can't even remember. It's an amusing parlour trick, but seems a very arbitrary, non-transferable skill he's developed.

He also has a couple of funny anecdotes about words that aren't allowed - like "picowatt", which rather offended our collective sensibilities as electrical engineers.

You're quite right that Scrabble is not about definitions, per se. But Scrabble does describe itself as a "word game", and it really isn't - it's more of a memorization with a bit of math kind of game.

This reminds me of the documentary "Wordplay" about competitive crossword puzzle players. Without a formal proof, my guess is that scrabble is faster to solve that a hard crossword puzzle for a computer. It's amazing that the human mind can stitch together patterns like these and internalize that in a meaningful way. A cool extension of this project would be to write a scrabble tool that generates arbitrary strategies that would be useful for a human player. So instead of generating the best play for a move, the program would recognize that "when the board is like X, then try and use strategy Y"

Awesome project @zephod!

It depends what you mean by solve. Scrabble, as a two-player game, has a significant branching factor compounded by the fact that the tile drawing makes it both a stochastic game as well as one with hidden information. Maven http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maven_(Scrabble) is an AI that can play Scrabble, and it's good, but it's certainly not "solved".

On the other hand, crossword puzzles are single-player games that use natural language wordplay to create a challenge. Some AI work has been done in this field, which can use a Web search engine (like Google) to try and determine the answer to each clue based on the clue (as well as any candidate words/letters already filled in). The hard part is understanding the clue. Look to systems like IBM's Watson to see how those kinds of problems can be solved.

"Solution" in a single player game, like a crossword puzzle, is solved in exactly one way: when all the rows and columns are filled with legal words (usually -- unless the author rigged it to allow clues to have multiple solutions, like the election day crossword in the NYT in 1996). A "solution" in a two-player game is when, no matter what move you make, your opponent knows perfect play. For example, checkers is solved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_(draughts_player)

quackle [http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/] is an open-source scrabble ai that can currently play on par with all but the very best human players. which is not the same thing as scrabble being "solved" of course, but it does bode well for the state of the art.

I am pretty sure Maven was playing at the same level circa 2001, so not surprised to hear other AIs are doing just as well in 2011.

I guess it's kind of like chess: it's almost impossible to beat a computer, so it's effectively solved. Except when they play each other :)

  Ad absurdum - at one point, the world Scrabble champion was a fellow who didn't actually speak English.

That's not too surprising unless he played in English. Scrabble has editions for many languages.

The guy being allied about is Panupol Sujjayakorn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panupol_Sujjayakorn). He is Thai. In Thailand, scrabble is used to learn English.

Unlike with Chinese, it is not impossible to make a Thai scrabble, but I doubt there is one, given the size of its alphabet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet)

i've been to the king's cup tournament in bangkok a couple of times. there's a children's tournament run in parallel in the same venue, and it was a truly amazing sight to see thousands of kids squaring off across scrabble boards. i truly wish school scrabble would take off in india; as it is, this year we didn't even manage to find two kids to go for the world youth scrabble championship :(

He did play in English, actually. That's what made it so ridiculous.

he (i'm assuming you're referring to panupol) knew some english; he just didn't speak it very well. but you're right, at a tournament level scrabble is a lot more about memorisation and strategy than it is about vocabulary.

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