There's been world champion level Scrabble AI since around 2002 [0]. There hasn't been anything groundbreaking on it since: not because nobody has thought of i

There's been world champion level Scrabble AI since around 2002 [0]. There hasn't been anything groundbreaking on it since: not because nobody has thought of it as a research problem, but because, unlike chess, improvements to the algorithm haven't led to great improvements in performance. This would suggest that Maven is pretty close to perfect: the game just isn't that deep, and the randomness of the tiles drawn dominates any small performance gain. For human players a large part of the game is in knowing the word list: even world champions spend hours poring over different permutations of that, which a computer can access instantly. The strategic part of the game seems interesting, but can be almost completely accounted for with some simple heuristics and the knowledge of which tiles remain. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370201001667 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000437020...