I 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.
Stefan 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.)
This 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.
> 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.
Check 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.
jerhewet|2 years ago
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0142002267
sparky_z|2 years ago
kevincox|1 year ago
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|2 years ago
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|2 years ago