Scrabble's Best Player Knows No Limits
29 points by disadvantage 1 year ago | 5 comments- jerhewet 1 year agoI recommend "Word Freak" by Stefan Fatsis if you're looking for a non-fiction novel about the world of competitive Scrabble. It's one of the most entertaining and well-written books I've ever read. Almost impossible to put down once you've started it.
- sparky_z 1 year agoStefan Fatsis also being the author of this article, so if you've read the article you've already gotten a preview of his writing style. (Just mentioning in case someone hadn't put that together.)
- sparky_z 1 year ago
- kevincox 1 year agoThis article talks a lot about Nigel being better than AI. Is that true? It seems that with a quarter million words and a fairly limited search space a bot would pretty easily be able to find the best word for any play. It might get a bit more complicated if you are also planning for future moves but it still seems like a bot should be able to out-play the best humans pretty easily.
Don't get me wrong, Nigel's skills are hugely impressive. But I feel this AI talk was more pandering to the current hype than and actual claim that he was better than a computer solver.
- simpletone 1 year ago> He is widely believed to have memorized the entire international-English Scrabble lexicon, more than 280,000 words
Definitely helps.
> Nigel extended ZAP to ZAPATEADOS
My problem is I try to extend the word rather than create new words. So I'd look for zapped, unzapped, zapping, etc. Actually, if I had 'ATEADOS', I would waste my time looking for a 7 letter word ending in S.
> Nigel placed all of his letters between the P and TED, spelling out PERNOCTATED and turning NON into ANON. The play tallied 92 points.
Now that is genuinely impressive.
I wish scrabble had platforms as widely available and free as chess does.
- cdelsolar 1 year agoCheck out https://woogles.io (disclaimer I am a cofounder). AGPLV3 platform with world class bots, puzzles, a free analyzer, clubs/tournaments, and more to come. You can see the source code at https://github.com/woogles-io/liwords. We recently hit 5M games played and have hosted a few major tournaments.
- cdelsolar 1 year ago