Scrabble endgames are computationally difficult to solve exhaustively. I used some chess programming techniques to greatly speed them up.

I have found that in the literature about games and AI (artificial intelligence) that Scrabble is invariably referred to as something of a “solved” game, in the same way that Chess, Go, etc are “solved” by AI —in these latter games, there exist AIs that have superhuman performance and can basically beat any person.

I’m going to log more of my progress on the apps that I wrote about in an earlier post, in an attempt to: make myself more likely to work on these apps write a log for me and others and drum up some excitement! ;) Monte Carlo simulation is basically working on Macondo. I expect that since I just got it working, that I’ll discover some bugs and special cases, and there’s so much more I want to do with it, but for now I’m excited that I got it working.

The article here sums up pretty well the debacle that North American tournament Scrabble players have been faced with since the introduction of the new Tournament Word List in April of 2015: Major Scrabble Brouhaha: Can You Copyright a List of Words? _In the 1980s, when Brian Sheppard created a computer program that played Scrabble, he typed in a lot of words-more than…_www.slate.com Basically, Hasbro or Merriam-Webster or both decided to take the volunteer work various Scrabble players did in putting together a new word list, slapped a copyright on it, and made it impossible for players to obtain a digital version of the word list.

YOM is better than the bingo CO(E)MpLOY