[jasone]

I got sucked into a variant of Scrabble insanity. In 2018 I spent close to six months writing a Scrabble engine, initially as an exercise to learn OCaml. But the algorithmic challenges pulled me deep down a fascinating rabbit hole. Eventually I was recording IRL games with my wife so I could analyze the positions, trying to understand why/how to exchange more often, and trying to make the engine ever stronger. It still lacks an end-game mode (where perfect play is possible due to empty letter bag), but by the time I put it aside, it appeared to be at least as strong as Quackle. (Fair comparison is hard since more CPU time allows deeper analysis.)

It's a project I hope to go back to someday, and maybe follow up on some of the human-like play options and variants I came up with along the way. The tournament word list is proprietary and at the time there were apparently no reasonable licensing options (licensing has since improved), which put a damper on releasing my engine.

[zem]

if your engine is open source i'd love to see one written in ocaml!