Word Up 208
theodp writes "Depending on your perspective, the National Scrabble Championship is a major sporting event, an unrivalled intellectual competition, or the world's biggest dork-fest. So says Slate's Dan Wachtell, who turned to an anagram-drilling Unix program to gain an edge on the 850+ competitors. While hardly mainstream, competitive Scrabble is getting newfound attention thanks to the publication of Word Freak and release of Word Wars."
Word To You, Bro (Score:5, Interesting)
I like Scrabble so much, I keep running down the battery on my PDA playing the scrabble-like game on it. It gave me the low battery warning this morning so I had to read during lunch.
I'll give these a look though, particularly Word Wars as even AVP wasn't as exciting as most alternative film is. Truth has a habit of being far more interesting than fiction, what with the boring repetitiveness of formula cinema.
To Scrabble beginners, here's some advice: Make the best of the least letters. High scores can be achieved with 2 and 3 letter words and leave fewer openings for opponents. Study the Scrabble dictionary between games. RE, LA, NU are words ;-)
When I heard that the end of wooden tiles was coming, I dashed down to the local game shop and scored one of those sets. I can't imagine playing this with plastic bits, not after my dad taught me the game ages ago. Call me tradition bound.
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'*.
* Fred is a cycling term for wannabe, but with a strongly negative connotation
Spelling Bee (Score:3, Interesting)
ESPN telecasts and I always watch it
Its pretty entertaining actually in a nerdy kind of way. (Isn't that the reason we are all on slashdot!)
And Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy on ESPN) wrote an interesting diary [go.com] too.
Re:Spelling Bee (Score:2, Interesting)
Er, most scrabble freaks ARE girls (Score:2, Interesting)
Women tend to like word games more than men do. Scrabble competitions are mainly composed of housewives reinvigorated after a life of raising kids by this game.
It's what bridge used to be.
The problem is that these are saggy, married girls. *sigh*
sporting event (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Big point scrabble words... (Score:4, Interesting)
Words from any language are acceptable. Depending on who in my family is playing any given game can involve up to ten languages (more if you count things like Ye Olde English and Latin).
Gets kind of interesting at times!
Re:Big point scrabble words... (Score:2, Interesting)
Obsolete phrase (Score:4, Interesting)
"Mainstream" was rendered obsolete when search engines were invented. There is no such thing as "mainstream" or "mass market" any more. Detergent is a mass market. Everything else is non-mainstream.
Anagram-drilling Unix program (Score:2, Interesting)
On that same not, how are computers at playing Scrabble anyway? I would think that they'd be pretty good at it, since they could just generate a list of potential anagrams, check them in a dictionary, and then use a maximize function which would search a couple moves deep for the best scoring path.
Re:Has anyone... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or, assuming you had one of the letters, say the 'L', on the board in the right spot, say the lower right hand of the board, this could end up as:
Which comes out to 144 points. Not too bad for slashdot!
Remember: In Scrabble, placement is everything.
I proposed that way (Score:3, Interesting)
When I proposed to her, it was via the ring in the tile bag.
I later found out that some crappy movie with JLo also had a Scrabble proposal in it, but I haven't seen said movie.
We play less Scrabble these days mainly due to less free time.
Re:UNIX program? Easy! (Score:5, Interesting)
This means that the lookup for any combination of characters on the board / in the rack is blazingly fast. Want to check the string 'getgstsd' for validity? Well, g passes, ge passes, get passes, getg... Bzzzzt. Wrong, no valid words down this path! Next please.
This is MUCH faster than a traditional binary search, and when you are checking typically thousands of existences per valid board location per move, it's worth it.
All this ignores the nasty recursive algorithms to identify valid placement options, considering that placing a word may create invalid words along the opposite axis - so any extra words created need to be checked for validity too.
I ended up writing a program to play scrabble and it used a feedback mechanism on several criteria (number of tiles used, place in game, ahead or behind status, number of premium squares used, number of premuim squares opened up etc) to weight future decisions. I'm a very good player and this program very quickly destroyed me. It was fascinating though to watch it play itself.
Back in the day it was running on a 486dx2/66 and took about 2 seconds per move so it was possible to watch the games develop.
I still have the code somewhere (in PASCAL!)... I really should break it back out and get it to compile on something new.
Cheers - N
You can't spell that on television (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You Roc (Score:2, Interesting)
: )
The thing that frustrates me the most about that damn thing is how inconsistent it is. I have a
OED or nothin'.
Re:Scrabble...a sporting event?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.