Recent Blog posts
Beyond Leave Tables: A State-of-the-Art CNN Static Evaluator for Scrabble
Saturday, Jun 21, 2025
I’ve trained a convolutional neural network that beats our long-standing equity engine (HastyBot’s static evaluator) in direct play - 51.7 % win rate over 250K self-play games - making it, as far as we know, the strongest pure static evaluator in Scrabble today. In this post I walk through the feature set (board image, rack, bag, tempo, power-tile counts, more), the training pipeline, results, and why a value-only CNN is already changing how we build BestBot’s Monte Carlo search. Code, weights, and data scripts are all open-sourced for anyone who wants to tinker.
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WordVault - a new spaced repetition web app for learning words
Sunday, Oct 13, 2024
I just released a new web app for learning words called WordVault. Read more about it here.
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How to unf*ck Arch Linux
Wednesday, Jun 28, 2023
Arch Linux is the main system on my desktop computer. I love it but sometimes it screws up. Here are some tricks for unscrewing it up.
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Exhaustively solving Scrabble endgames using chess programming techniques
Se7en is a great film
Let's Listen - Falling for You
2022 is finally the year of Linux on the desktop, and I can prove it
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