7 ms·

How exactly does one memorize an essentially random list of approximately 40,000 strings such that they could pull any of those strings out a hat at will in jus

• darepublic 2y ago
  You could cheat with computer too
  • numeri 2y ago
    Nigel Richards usually outperforms (and is orders of magnitude faster than, at least for the complicated endgames, if I understand correctly) the best computer Scrabble programs.
• nkrisc 2y ago
  Some just have different brains. I think most people could not do that no matter how hard they tried, but with billions of people some just can.
  • Onavo 2y ago
    It's not as hard as you think, he's an English speaker and French and English shares approximately 40% of the vocabulary. And once you have mastered French, you have the other 80% needed for Spanish as it's a Latin language like French.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • recursive 2y ago
      How hard do you think I think it is? Are you implying that it's easy for an English speaker to master the English scrabble word list?
      • bee_rider 2y ago
        Well, I think it is impossible, so the comment works for me. And I refuse to update my priors to account for the fact that somebody did it. Because I can’t even memorize the English scrabble dictionary well enough to enjoy playing. I am happier to live in a universe in which Scrabble is just impossible.
    • latentsea 2y ago
      For the stated time frame, it's definitely as hard as you think, and then much, much, much harder.
• lupire 2y ago
  Most of the points are in bonuses and bongos, so you don't have to care much about the short words with common letters.
  • radlad 2y ago
    In fact, maybe it's better not to think of them!
  • vunderba 2y ago
    In fact, you do need to care about the short words. 1. they can be useful at locking down the board 2. knowing all of the words is necessary to be able to challenge when somebody attempt to play a phony, which, as a native Spanish speaker, you might be even more inclined to try against a non-native speaker.
    • 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
      Do professional scrabble players use fake words as a strategy? I assumed that (minus the weirdo savant playing in a foreign language), everyone at the professional level has an extensive vocabulary for which it would be difficult to bluff.
      • vunderba 2y ago
        It's not super common but if I was playing against somebody who didn't speak the lingua franca I'd probably throw out a couple phonies to test the waters. The CSW is the official English word list used internationally (outside of the US/Thailand/Canada because we just HAD to be different) and contains over a quarter of a million words. Unless you're at the UPPER OF UPPER ECHELONS, there's a chance a crafty player could slip a phony in by hooking an "S" on the board or some other subtle stem - especially with the pressure of time controls.
        • numeri 2y ago
          There was at least one case of someone trying this against Nigel in French, and he got them.
• teractiveodular 2y ago
  The strings are neither random nor independent. There are many English cognates, groups of related words, patterns of word formation, etc. It's still an insane feat, since it typically takes actual language learners years to get anywhere close to a native speaker's inventory of 10,000+ words.
  • YawningAngel 2y ago
    Depends which language learners. There are people who can learn 50 new words a day for months, but those people are rare and there feats are probably not replicable for most of us. https://isaak.net/mandarin/ https://isaak.net/mandarin/ is an example edit: Isaak is great, but it was 22 words per day not 50
    • latentsea 2y ago
      My pace is typically 35 words a day when learning languages and most people think that's insane. It's still only around 1000 a month, which is why I chose that number. That's on the order of 12k a year if you don't miss a single day, which you usually do. The claim here is memorizing a full dictionary in 9 weeks. That has to be at least 40,000 words in 63 days. 634 words per day. And then or forgetting it. It's beyond rare. Its alien.
      • rightbyte 2y ago
        Have you learnt many languages? I wish I had the energy to wanna do it. In school 35 words a day would be really pushing it for me. It had a really hard time learning English words. I had to study like an hour for 20 words to pass the test. But I learned grammar really fast.
        • latentsea 2y ago
          Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Fluent in Japanese, can watch kdrama and mostly follow along and have basic conversations in Korean, forgot virtually all the Chinese I did but I managed to pass HSK2 after 2 months of study and then HSK3 the following month. I was only in China for 3 months on a work trip, so I thought I'd have some fun.
• vunderba 2y ago
  The "sorcery" you're looking for is the correct genetic sequences that leads to an eidetic memory. No amount of compensation using mnemonic devices and memory palaces will get you even close to what Nigel Richards is capable of.
  • thrance 2y ago
    Genetic, or epigenetic!
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • tshaddox 2y ago
    Eh, I bet he’s using some normal Latin vocabulary and orthography skills too. I suspect he wouldn’t do quite at well memorizing a truly random set of combinations of 26 symbols.
    • zeroonetwothree 2y ago
      Right it’s not random that it was French, and not, say, Russian.
      • dmurray 2y ago
        You say that, but there are some world-class Scrabble players from Thailand who play Scrabble in English, a language with a completely different alphabet and orthography from their native tongue. They don't necessarily speak English well, either. One beat Nigel Richards for the World Championship in 2009 [0]. I think it would take Richards about 20 minutes to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and a few weeks to get familiar enough with the patterns of Russian to be a competitive player in that language. World champion is obviously a harder ask, but I wouldn't rule it out. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakorn_Nemitrmansuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakorn_Nemitrmansuk
      • borski 2y ago
• masfuerte 2y ago
  Apparently his mother said, about teaching him Scrabble: "When he learnt to talk he wasn't interested in words, just numbers. I said: I know a game you're not going to be very good at because you can't spell very well and you weren't good at English at school." I guess the sorcery you are looking for is spite.
  • username135 2y ago
    amen to that
  • liquidise 2y ago
    > the sorcery you are looking for is spite. Both philosophical and poetic. True brilliance.
  • stevage 2y ago
    Scrabble really is a maths game. It just looks like a word game.
    • vikingerik 2y ago
      Right. It's not a word game, it's an area-control game with 150,000 rules for legal placement of your resources. Codenames is a word game. Scrabble is about arbitrary sequences of glyphs.
      • stevage 2y ago
        Interestingly there are versions with more restricted tilesets and hence fever words to learn. Like one that only uses the letters of BOGGLE.
• vunderba 2y ago
  Where did you pull that number from? The ODS which is the official French Scrabble dictionary has something like 300,000 words. In 9 weeks that's averaging memorizing several THOUSAND words PER DAY. And don't give me BULL like "well plurality S/ES means a lot less" - yeah. NO. He still has to remember which words take what kind of plurality. And if you watch ANY interviews with him, you can tell he doesn't really take any shortcuts - he just straight-up memorizes them as a series of playable "tokens". I'm all for the "indomitable human spirit" but you could practice 24/7 and you'd still be SCRABBLING at base camp while Nigel Richards summitted Everest without the aid of supplemental oxygen. https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8 https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8
  • wongarsu 2y ago
    Scrolled to a random position in the file, and there's 37 lines of all declinations of the word "monologue". Followed by a bunch of nouns with just two to four forms, followed by 47 declinations of the word "monopolise". What he did is no small feat. You still have to memorize which suffixes are possible in which verbs (there are rules he would pick up on, but there are exceptions to the rules). But it is made easier by French verbs having a lot of possible suffixes, those suffixes being fairly regular, and English taking a lot of its "fancy" words with French (or adopting a Latin version that's close to what French adopted from Latin). I still couldn't come close to thinking about achieving it. He is doing the extreme sport version of scrabble for sure. And these advantages in French make it even more impressive that he could do the same even in Spanish.
    • Asraelite 2y ago
      I actually don't think the exceptions are much of a problem overall. Most irregularities in a language happen with the most common words. Once you go from learning the most common words to simply learning all the words, the relative frequency of irregular formations that you encounter would go down dramatically.
  • BurningFrog 2y ago
    98% of those words are useless for competitive Scrabble.
• ta_1138 2y ago
  While knowing every possible word is very helpful in scrabble, the most useful, important words for the game will be very different than the words that are useful for speaking the language well. There's many words out there that are going to be almost unusable, as they are low value. So you aren't really going to need all the words, but you want to memorize basically every word that uses the high scoring tiles, and understand how wide the 'gaps' you are leading when you leave high value letters on the board, especially near high scoring, whole word tiles. So you arent' overestimating how long it takes to memorize words, but how useful having a good, normal vocabulary in the language actually is for being good at scrabble. Go look at guides for English scrabble, and see the words you are trying to memorize.
  • BurningFrog 2y ago
    It would be interesting to determine how few words a Scrabble program needs to know to be a world class player!
    • brookst 2y ago
      It will be probabilistic, because of the randomness of the draw. More words = greater chance of high scoring words for this board and draw. It likely wouldn’t take many words at all to beat a workd class player 1% of the time, and a pretty substantial vocabulary to win 99% of the time. Actually, 99% may not even be achievable because sometimes your opponent will just luck out with letters and board lineup.
  • Panzer04 2y ago
    Be that as it may, Nigel Richards (the scrabble star in this story) apparently knows virtually every word regardless, and fairly minimal study (supposedly).
  • ASUfool 2y ago
    Sorry, but you do not *want to "basically memorize every word that uses the high scoring tiles." Rather, you want to study the low-scoring tile-filled words because those are more likely to be found on one's rack. A key to high-scoring games is scoring "bingos" or using all 7 letters in a rack in a single turn as it gives a 50 point bonus. This is why we're taught to memorize the word lists that have such letters as TISANE in them as that string combines with most every other letter to make a bingo. The letters in TISANE are 1 point each. You also don't want to leave vowels (all of which are worth 1 point each) adjacent to the bonus squares. A parallel play with an I under/to the right of a triple-letter-square can easily score 62 if one puts a Q on the triple and another I to make QI both ways.
• 1209412comb 2y ago
  How fast he was able to achieve this is amazing, but you probably can already do this with Chinese characters ( I assume you are from a Latin based language ), and even intuit how radicals combine into a character.
  • latentsea 2y ago
    Nope? Not at that pace anyway. At a fast pace for a human, yes, but not at 60x faster than "fast".
• stevage 2y ago
  It's a tiny bit easier town that in that if you learn a tiny bit of grammar you can extrapolate sets of reloted words where you add an extra E or S or both.
• sionisrecur 2y ago
  Avoid trying to make sense of how to write them based on how they sound seems like a start.
• DontchaKnowit 2y ago
  mneumonic devices. 'memory palace' techniques. Currently learning spanish using this and it is pretty absurdly effective. Definitely couldn't do 40k words in 9 weeks, but obviously im a rank novice and this dude is a pro. But yeah I've memorized probably 2k words, their meanings, and their idiomatic usages in about 90 days using a program called learncraft spanish that uses mneumonic devices.
• mmmore 2y ago
  Reportedly, by reading through the list twice and then reciting it to himself on bike rides.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J