4 ms·

I don't really understand this - has someone really gone to all this trouble to help people cheat at a free word game?

• labo 14y ago
  It's actually a pretty cool experiment... is it not?
• gojomo 14y ago
  It's the interesting problem -- letter recognition, dictionary search, constrained ranking -- that likely motivates the author(s). The practical use in helping cheaters is just a bonus for bringing added attention to the engineering achievement. Still, the Letterpress board is so fixed in its layout/fonts that I'm surprised they need a 'neural network' recognizer, and prefer a certain color scheme. Advanced assignment: calculate whether any given board is a 'solved' game, with a predictable outcome given two 'perfect' players. (My guess is that all boards are, given the advantage of moving first in biasing the score balance in your direction.)
  • boundsj 14y ago
    re "solved game" http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/11/letterpress-solved-games/ http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/11/letterpress-solved-gam...
  • MrScruff 14y ago
    I understand why some might be motivated to solve it as a problem, but it doesn't seem a particular impressive technical achievement to me. It's just like how everyone and his dog was writing soduku solvers a few years back. Except in this case it's basically contributing to ruining a game, or at least the 'play with strangers' component. I would have thought a blog post outlining the approach taken to solve the problem would have sufficed.
    • gojomo 14y ago
      There were already cheap apps in the App Store for Letterpress cheating, so showing off open-source code (or a web service) doesn't change a cheater's prospects much. On the other hand it does serve as practice/illustration of the techniques involved.
• baddox 14y ago
  Yes, and how is that different than, say, chess AIs, which were a holy grail of AI research?