Michael Fogleman
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Scrabble!
It's time for another nerd-tastic post! And this time it's about that classic game known as Scrabble. I play this game with my parents just about every time I visit. But recently my friend Rachael got me playing online at games.com. But I wasn't happy with their interface so I searched for a better online Scrabble. And I found it! It's the Internet Scrabble Club, hosted at http://www.isc.ro/ They have their own program that you download and run to connect to their Scrabble server. The reason I like it is because there's no extra fluff -- it's just Scrabble. Also, this is where serious Scrabble players play, so you know it has to be good. The server tracks your wins, losses, and rating. You can also view your past 10 or so games at any time. All of the games are timed, ranging anywhere from a few minutes to about an hour, per person.
And so I've been playing online Scrabble quite a lot. So far I've played about 90 games. One morning I woke up and I was playing Scrabble in my head! And this leads me to the second portion of this blog post... As you know, I'm a computer programmer. So when I get addicted to something like Scrabble, it's only natural for me to want to program it. And, well, that's what I did last weekend when I was sick. I wrote a program that plays Scrabble. No, not for cheating purposes. Only because I like a good programming challenge!
The program first loads a dictionary of about 170,000 words. It's the official Scrabble dictionary. Then, you can either type in moves or do a search with a set of tiles, to find the highest scoring move. Or you can tell the program to play a whole game of Scrabble against itself. After some optimizing, it can play a whole game in less than one second! It's average per-play score is anywhere around 25-40, depending a lot on what tiles it gets. And of course, I have yet to beat my own program at a game of Scrabble. And I still have improvements to make!
I'll soon add my Scrabble program to my software page on here. Speaking of which, I also need to add Pac-Man!
I'm personally working on a similar project. I call it the virtual internet charades engine (VICE). It basically plays charades by itself so that no more parties are ruined by that horrible game. You'll thank me later.
: 11:28 PM, February 23, 2005http://www.7thart.com/wordwars/
Worth seeking out.
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