10 ms·

A French Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French

165 points by archgoon 11y ago

bogardon 11y ago
Reminds me of this book walking with einstein (?) where people memorize decks of cards in minutes.
- ics 11y ago
  Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer.
- thesehands 11y ago
  One of the Chaps that helped Josh was Ed Cooke who founded Memrise (http://www.memrise.com http://www.memrise.com)
maaarghk 11y ago
This is absolutely beautiful. I'm interested in the comment that high level scrabble playing is more mathematical than linguistic; does there happen to be anyone here who could recommend some related reading?
- nl 11y ago
  At a high level, most people have memorized a large amount of the dictionary so the key is minimizing the score the opposition can get when you play a work, while still maximizing your score. http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/621823/probability-my-opponent-has-a-specific-scrabble-letter-mid-game http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/621823/probability-m...
- airza 11y ago
  it is mildly statistical, but this basically pales to the amount of memorization you can do. It's good to set your rack up so that you have a good chance of getting decent letters in the subsequent turns, but the gradient of improvement is almost always in favor of "memorize more words" (admittedly, by going through the most common to least common groups of six letters plus one more) rather than math. But in the strictest sense, statistics is more important than linguistics. It just doesn't really matter because memorization is so much more important than both of them. The book Word Freak was pretty good and as far as I can tell, accurate.
  - mistercow 11y ago
    > memorization is so much more important than both of them Is that really true at this high of a level though? There are a little under 120K words in SOWPODS that are 9 letters or less (looking through some of those archived games, it seems like 10+ letter words are uncommon). So there's a hard upper bound on what memorization can do for you, and it seems plausible that that limit (or close enough to make strategy the dominating factor) would have been reached by a handful of people.
    - airza 11y ago
      I mean, maybe? That's still a scenario where the vast amount of memorization you did is more important than the strategy you may come up with. There aren't top players who got there with superior strategy and a vastly inferior vocabulary.
      - rue 11y ago
        I feel like ‘vocabulary’ is a slightly misleading word in this context, since it implies some level of understanding. ‘Set of allowed combinations of letters’ is evidently the measure used.
      - mistercow 11y ago
        > That's still a scenario where the vast amount of memorization you did is more important than the strategy you may come up with But if both players have memorized about the same number of words, the game is then entirely about strategy. I think that's the point of what the article is saying. Sure, memorization is critical to get to the point where you can compete at that level, but once you're there, memorization is just a given. What differentiates the players' performance is their strategy.
- mrdmnd 11y ago
  I believe Jason Katz-Brown reads this board (@jasonkb) who is the author of the Quackle AI (the strongest scrabble program, perhaps?) http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/ http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/
- ImpressiveWebs 11y ago
  Stefan Fatsis' book Word Freak is a must-read for anyone that wants to get an inside view into the characters and lifestyle of tournament Scrabble: http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Competitive/dp/0142002267 http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Compet... Beware, though, lots of F-words in the book, because of certain personalities featured prominently in it.
  - wainstead 11y ago
    Thank you! During lunch break I walked to my local library and checked it out.
steve19 11y ago
People don't seem to like it when something they cherish is reduced to symbols. I got a good laugh out of this comment at the Guardian: "I think it renders the whole thing pointless. It ceases to be a word game. I think that, as in tennis and cricket, there should be the right of challenge, and if the person doesn't know the meaning of the word, the go doesn't count and the word is removed." ~ MichaelBulley I am sure Mr Bulley would prefer it if Chess players could challenge their opponent to prove he or she is a either a Monarch, a Lord, Knight or at the very least a commoner who lives in a castle.
- matthewrudy 11y ago
  Learning the word + the meaning just grows the size of the set you need to memorise. But actually that'd be a fun variant. A spelling bee where you choose the word based on the constraints of scrabble.
  - netrus 11y ago
    And it makes the training less pointless. Words without meaning are useful for nothing besides winning Scrabble, knowing strange words WITH meaning however has a chance to be useful outside the game.
  - prawn 11y ago
    Surely it would be incredibly subjective to require a definition? Whereas in Scrabble as it stands, a move is either legal or illegal. It's very black and white. Well, once you decide on the dictionary you're playing to! I stopped playing Scrabble against my father because he was frustrated that I had memorised every two and three letter word. Even being able to define many didn't matter; if they came across as though they were memorised rather than learnt, he was annoyed. I don't see the issue. Everyone who plays is playing by the same rules.
    - jon-wood 11y ago
      Having played a lot of Scrabble with my wife I can feel for your father a bit. I think its probably less about having memorised them, and more about two players of dramatically different skill levels playing the same game. Eventually I came to terms with it and just considered anything within a two hundred points or so of my wife's score as a personal win, but it can still be frustrating to feel you're playing your best and losing to someone who's barely trying. The moral of this story I think is not to play an English graduate at Scrabble unless you're OK with losing.
ThomPete 11y ago
So in some weirdly ironic way this is Searles Chinese Room in action.
- iwwr 11y ago
  Except a lot of natural language grammar is contextual, so there is no way to have a conversation that makes sense without an understanding (internal model) of the meanings of words and really together with the cultural context: literature, pop culture, current events etc. You may be able to produce valid sentences that still sound bogus though.
  - escherize 11y ago
    Um, I think there's a challenge with this analysis of the Chinese Room argument. The argument presupposes a perfect lookup table of (sentance -> sentance). So the point of the argument is that given the correct responses, there's no way to tell if there is a contextual understanding. Now you can say that such a table cannot possibly exist, but you would have to say why.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    Not sure I understand what you mean. Searles Chinese Room argument although fundamentally flawed (the entire room or house is the conscious part) it says that although you can have a person spitting out the right translations the person is does not speak Chinese. Isn't that whats going on here?
- lmm 11y ago
  Scrabble is a much simpler problem than natural conversation.
  - ThomPete 11y ago
    The Chinese room isn't a conversation thats the whole point. It actually unwillingly represents the neurons in my brain that doesn't understand Chinese either. Searle is making the wrong analogy because all he shows is whats going on with the input/output when he really should show the entire house as the intelligent part.
hkmurakami 11y ago
This reminds me of my international student friends in college with perfect SAT Verbal scores but very poor writing/speaking/listening abilities. Boy were those guys smart.
toolslive 11y ago
A chess buddy of mine did exactly the same: he was in a mental institution for a while and completely bored, and also a scrabble maniac. There was nobody to play with except for an old lady who only spoke French. He memorized the French dictionary (in < 2 days, I can add); only the words, as the semantics had no value. He was less bored after that.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  A friend of mine did something similar with the game Scramble With Friends on her phone. She got bored kicking everyone's asses on the English version, so she started playing Danish, which she'd never seen. She just tried various combos, remembering what worked. She was globally ranked in the top 1% in like a week. It's just patterns in the end.
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    A lot of Danish people play the English version of games like this.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      I'm going to take a wild guess and a much greater percentage of Danes speak English than anglophones speak Danish.
noahlt 11y ago
The English Scrabble championships have also included a few Thai winners who barely speak English.
realusername 11y ago
(French here) I'm not surprised at all. I've seen a documentary once about Scrabble competitions and the guys were discussing after the match about the missed possibilities. One guy was complaining that he could almost get one long obscure word I've never heard about which would be worth a lot of points and the others were discussing about it. The reporter then asked them what the word meant and no one had any idea. Not a single French player could explain what the word meant, it was just in the official dictionary, that's all. When you organize a Scrabble competition, you need to have an official dictionary or people start inventing non-sense words to get points. In French for example, you could add the prefix 're' (meaning again or back) to almost any verb and everyone would understand, this is just an example but it's really easy to create nonsense words that people understand from their root. And since you have an official dictionary, it's not about words anymore, it's about memorizing the dictionary.
- emmelaich 11y ago
  But that's the thing about Scrabble! My wife has poorer vocabulary than me and can't spell for nuts. But she beats me at Scrabble 80% of the time. You really don't need to know the meaning. You can vastly improve your game just by knowing words like jo, qi xi, aa.. Aside -- words like qi have changed the game a lot.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    As a slightly competitive Scrabble player, words like qi have ruined the game. You should need to know the meaning of the word to play it. This applies for short words and long words alike.
    - Eye_of_Mordor 11y ago
      Scrabble is a play of words or meaning? Perhaps you're looking for the triple word scrore in today's crossword puzzle as well?
    - ryanklee 11y ago
      > You should need to know the meaning of the word to play it How would you go about determining in a regulated fashion whether someone knows the meaning of a word? Would you have them offer a definition to be checked against an official dictionary? Would the definition given have to match the official dictionary definition word for word? Is so, wouldn't this simply force high-level scrabble players to memorize not only the official words but the official meanings themselves? And if perfect matching wouldn't be required, how much variation would be allowed and how would such variation be measured? There's no sense in falling back on the "just use the word in a sentence" proof, either. Because that's no proof at all, since, even if we dispense with all the problems consensus introduces, if the usage is contested, then some official dictionary definition will have to be referenced in the end. And then you're going to have to deal with the above mentioned issues anyways. The desire for a more natural, simple and organic Scrabble world in which any word played must be theoretically backended by a player's knowledge of its definition is, well, just asking for trouble.
logicrime 11y ago
That picture looks like a mugshot. When that link opened up I thought, "Gee, you'd think they'd mention that he was in prison!" That's really cool. I don't think that just because a person doesn't use a word regularly, that they don't 'deserve' the word or can't play the word on the board. There's THOUSANDS of words, nobody uses all of them. I hate this attitude towards people who play games over time, and they start showing signs of game theory during play, and suddenly it's 'not about the game anymore', but it's always BEEN about the game. The goal is to win!
- Sven7 11y ago
  The kids call it Deep Learning these days.
  - logicrime 11y ago
    A lot of crap I see isn't Deep at all, it's just prior knowledge being re-applied to a more specific scenario.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
People's confusion about whether being too methodical about winning the game is against the game spirit are missing that games, especially spectator sports, have conflicting goals. As a player, your goal is to win the game, period. But for everyone else, including spectators and the whole support industry that is built around the game, it doesn't matter who wins. It matters only that the crowd is entertained. A player being too good makes the game boring, and so it is discouraged. You can see this dynamic more or less clearly in pretty much every sport (F-1 being a notable example). The rules of the game are so constructed as to "level the playing field", to mostly eliminate any kind of advantage a player may bring to the field - like better tech or supplements. The crowd needs to see fierce competition, where everything depends on the talent of players. But then again it can't be too obviously random. If people feel they can't predict the result, they won't enjoy it. Doesn't matter if the game is inherently random or not; it only needs to not look like it. Then there's danger. Safe sports are boring, but actual accidents will detract people from enjoying the show, so again you need to create a sense of imminent danger while minimizing any real chance of a problem. I mentioned F-1, because it's a notable example of a sport where all rules are constantly adjusted to ensure that you can't win by having better tech. Personally, I hate this whole showbusiness and the engineering of enjoyment. I would appreciate a game with rules set up so people would be free to develop better strategies and better tech in order to dominate.
- Raurin 11y ago
  Actually curious: is the goal of the F-1 rule changes to level the playing field? I'd heard it was to keep automakers on their toes, guiding the competition towards things that the general public wants, too, like gas efficiency. If I remember correctly, one of the more recent years saw a huge tank capacity reduction, ostensibly to force automakers to create powerful engines while maintaining some semblance of efficiency.
  - danko 11y ago
    There are many, many objectives for which the F1 rules need to account. Competitive balance is one of them. Providing interesting and relevant technical challenges for automakers and teams is another (and was a major driver behind the recent switch to hybrid engines). In addition to those, you have safety, spectacle, cost-containment, logistical considerations, and about a thousand other goals that need to be incorporated. The FIA takes incredible flak for whatever they do because there are myriad tradeoffs between these objectives, and it's impossible to balance them all in a way that makes everyone happy.
archon 11y ago
We house-rule this. When playing Scrabble in my group of friends, we've added a rule that when a word is challenged, not only will the challenger look the word up in a dictionary, but the one who was challenged must correctly use the word in a sentence. It's more fun that way (for us), and it gives us all an incentive to go learn both the spelling and meaning of obscure words.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  As a teenager I used to read the dictionary for fun - this is my preferred form of the game!
discardorama 11y ago
They say he memorized "the" Scrabble dictionary. Is there a standard dictionary? Where can I see it? It would certainly help resolve conflicts next time :D
- ImpressiveWebs 11y ago
  There's a few different dictionaries. There's the official tournament word list (TWL or OWL), which has had different versions. The latest, I believe, is OWL2014. I think the version before that was TWL2, IIRC. But those books are only available to tournament scrabble players who pay an annual fee. It's a bit elitist, but that's just how it is (unless it has changed lately). Other than that, you can pick up a regular Scrabble game dictionary, usually called OSPD, which will not have any off-colour words in it. Those can be bought in any book store and you can even search the OSPD on Scrabble's official website.
ImpressiveWebs 11y ago
I used to play online scrabble using a desktop app built by the Internet Scrabble Club (isc.ro)[1]. If you go to a website called cross-tables.com [2], you'll see tournament results and rankings of top players in the world. I've played online games against nearly half the players currently listed on the top 20 in North America and the world. I haven't played regularly for years, so my current Scrabble skills are pretty poor, even though I did beat many of those guys the odd time in the past. One day I even played a number of "speed" games (3 minute games, those were fun!) against Trey Wright, the winner of the National Scrabble Championship in 2004. IIRC, I beat him in one game, by a single point, while he thrashed me in the other 9 or so. In order to compete against these guys, you have to basically learn words for no other reason than to use them in Scrabble games. Word definitions are useless. It's a bit of an addiction, and quite pointless, but it's fun when you actually end up playing a bizarre 8-letter word (e.g. OENOMELS) and win the game because of it. It's absolutely true that language has little to do with being good at Scrabble. I used to play against Thai players who had very little knowledge of English but who knew way more English words than I did or ever will. Of course, when online, you pretty much have to expect that people will cheat. Most of the time, the cheaters are obvious, because good Scrabble players recognize cheating when compared to real human game play. As for Nigel, the guy's not human. I don't remember if he was ever on ISC (many of the top players were at some point), but everyone in the Scrabble world knows him and knows his uncanny word knowledge and Scrabble abilities. And if anyone's interested in reading about the Scrabble tournament scene and the associated lifestyles, check out Stefan Fatsis' book "Word Freak"[3], probably the best Scrabble book ever written (although it does contain quite a few f-words, thanks to the colorful personalities that it describes, which I wasn't crazy about). [1] http://www.isc.ro/ http://www.isc.ro/ [2] http://cross-tables.com/ http://cross-tables.com/ [3] http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Competitive/dp/0142002267 http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Compet...
vijayr 11y ago
He memorized the dictionary in 9 weeks. That is astounding

165 points by archgoon 11y ago

bogardon 11y ago

Reminds me of this book walking with einstein (?) where people memorize decks of cards in minutes.

ics 11y ago
Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer.
thesehands 11y ago
One of the Chaps that helped Josh was Ed Cooke who founded Memrise (http://www.memrise.com http://www.memrise.com)

maaarghk 11y ago

This is absolutely beautiful. I'm interested in the comment that high level scrabble playing is more mathematical than linguistic; does there happen to be anyone here who could recommend some related reading?

nl 11y ago
At a high level, most people have memorized a large amount of the dictionary so the key is minimizing the score the opposition can get when you play a work, while still maximizing your score. http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/621823/probability-my-opponent-has-a-specific-scrabble-letter-mid-game http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/621823/probability-m...
airza 11y ago
it is mildly statistical, but this basically pales to the amount of memorization you can do. It's good to set your rack up so that you have a good chance of getting decent letters in the subsequent turns, but the gradient of improvement is almost always in favor of "memorize more words" (admittedly, by going through the most common to least common groups of six letters plus one more) rather than math. But in the strictest sense, statistics is more important than linguistics. It just doesn't really matter because memorization is so much more important than both of them. The book Word Freak was pretty good and as far as I can tell, accurate.
- mistercow 11y ago
  > memorization is so much more important than both of them Is that really true at this high of a level though? There are a little under 120K words in SOWPODS that are 9 letters or less (looking through some of those archived games, it seems like 10+ letter words are uncommon). So there's a hard upper bound on what memorization can do for you, and it seems plausible that that limit (or close enough to make strategy the dominating factor) would have been reached by a handful of people.
  - airza 11y ago
    I mean, maybe? That's still a scenario where the vast amount of memorization you did is more important than the strategy you may come up with. There aren't top players who got there with superior strategy and a vastly inferior vocabulary.
    - rue 11y ago
      I feel like ‘vocabulary’ is a slightly misleading word in this context, since it implies some level of understanding. ‘Set of allowed combinations of letters’ is evidently the measure used.
    - mistercow 11y ago
      > That's still a scenario where the vast amount of memorization you did is more important than the strategy you may come up with But if both players have memorized about the same number of words, the game is then entirely about strategy. I think that's the point of what the article is saying. Sure, memorization is critical to get to the point where you can compete at that level, but once you're there, memorization is just a given. What differentiates the players' performance is their strategy.
mrdmnd 11y ago
I believe Jason Katz-Brown reads this board (@jasonkb) who is the author of the Quackle AI (the strongest scrabble program, perhaps?) http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/ http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/
ImpressiveWebs 11y ago
Stefan Fatsis' book Word Freak is a must-read for anyone that wants to get an inside view into the characters and lifestyle of tournament Scrabble: http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Competitive/dp/0142002267 http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Compet... Beware, though, lots of F-words in the book, because of certain personalities featured prominently in it.
- wainstead 11y ago
  Thank you! During lunch break I walked to my local library and checked it out.

steve19 11y ago

People don't seem to like it when something they cherish is reduced to symbols. I got a good laugh out of this comment at the Guardian: "I think it renders the whole thing pointless. It ceases to be a word game. I think that, as in tennis and cricket, there should be the right of challenge, and if the person doesn't know the meaning of the word, the go doesn't count and the word is removed." ~ MichaelBulley I am sure Mr Bulley would prefer it if Chess players could challenge their opponent to prove he or she is a either a Monarch, a Lord, Knight or at the very least a commoner who lives in a castle.

matthewrudy 11y ago
Learning the word + the meaning just grows the size of the set you need to memorise. But actually that'd be a fun variant. A spelling bee where you choose the word based on the constraints of scrabble.
- netrus 11y ago
  And it makes the training less pointless. Words without meaning are useful for nothing besides winning Scrabble, knowing strange words WITH meaning however has a chance to be useful outside the game.
- prawn 11y ago
  Surely it would be incredibly subjective to require a definition? Whereas in Scrabble as it stands, a move is either legal or illegal. It's very black and white. Well, once you decide on the dictionary you're playing to! I stopped playing Scrabble against my father because he was frustrated that I had memorised every two and three letter word. Even being able to define many didn't matter; if they came across as though they were memorised rather than learnt, he was annoyed. I don't see the issue. Everyone who plays is playing by the same rules.
  - jon-wood 11y ago
    Having played a lot of Scrabble with my wife I can feel for your father a bit. I think its probably less about having memorised them, and more about two players of dramatically different skill levels playing the same game. Eventually I came to terms with it and just considered anything within a two hundred points or so of my wife's score as a personal win, but it can still be frustrating to feel you're playing your best and losing to someone who's barely trying. The moral of this story I think is not to play an English graduate at Scrabble unless you're OK with losing.

ThomPete 11y ago

So in some weirdly ironic way this is Searles Chinese Room in action.

iwwr 11y ago
Except a lot of natural language grammar is contextual, so there is no way to have a conversation that makes sense without an understanding (internal model) of the meanings of words and really together with the cultural context: literature, pop culture, current events etc. You may be able to produce valid sentences that still sound bogus though.
- escherize 11y ago
  Um, I think there's a challenge with this analysis of the Chinese Room argument. The argument presupposes a perfect lookup table of (sentance -> sentance). So the point of the argument is that given the correct responses, there's no way to tell if there is a contextual understanding. Now you can say that such a table cannot possibly exist, but you would have to say why.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  Not sure I understand what you mean. Searles Chinese Room argument although fundamentally flawed (the entire room or house is the conscious part) it says that although you can have a person spitting out the right translations the person is does not speak Chinese. Isn't that whats going on here?
lmm 11y ago
Scrabble is a much simpler problem than natural conversation.
- ThomPete 11y ago
  The Chinese room isn't a conversation thats the whole point. It actually unwillingly represents the neurons in my brain that doesn't understand Chinese either. Searle is making the wrong analogy because all he shows is whats going on with the input/output when he really should show the entire house as the intelligent part.

hkmurakami 11y ago

This reminds me of my international student friends in college with perfect SAT Verbal scores but very poor writing/speaking/listening abilities. Boy were those guys smart.

toolslive 11y ago

A chess buddy of mine did exactly the same: he was in a mental institution for a while and completely bored, and also a scrabble maniac. There was nobody to play with except for an old lady who only spoke French. He memorized the French dictionary (in < 2 days, I can add); only the words, as the semantics had no value. He was less bored after that.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
A friend of mine did something similar with the game Scramble With Friends on her phone. She got bored kicking everyone's asses on the English version, so she started playing Danish, which she'd never seen. She just tried various combos, remembering what worked. She was globally ranked in the top 1% in like a week. It's just patterns in the end.
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  A lot of Danish people play the English version of games like this.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    I'm going to take a wild guess and a much greater percentage of Danes speak English than anglophones speak Danish.

noahlt 11y ago

The English Scrabble championships have also included a few Thai winners who barely speak English.

realusername 11y ago

(French here) I'm not surprised at all. I've seen a documentary once about Scrabble competitions and the guys were discussing after the match about the missed possibilities. One guy was complaining that he could almost get one long obscure word I've never heard about which would be worth a lot of points and the others were discussing about it. The reporter then asked them what the word meant and no one had any idea. Not a single French player could explain what the word meant, it was just in the official dictionary, that's all. When you organize a Scrabble competition, you need to have an official dictionary or people start inventing non-sense words to get points. In French for example, you could add the prefix 're' (meaning again or back) to almost any verb and everyone would understand, this is just an example but it's really easy to create nonsense words that people understand from their root. And since you have an official dictionary, it's not about words anymore, it's about memorizing the dictionary.

emmelaich 11y ago
But that's the thing about Scrabble! My wife has poorer vocabulary than me and can't spell for nuts. But she beats me at Scrabble 80% of the time. You really don't need to know the meaning. You can vastly improve your game just by knowing words like jo, qi xi, aa.. Aside -- words like qi have changed the game a lot.
- dublinben 11y ago
  As a slightly competitive Scrabble player, words like qi have ruined the game. You should need to know the meaning of the word to play it. This applies for short words and long words alike.
  - Eye_of_Mordor 11y ago
    Scrabble is a play of words or meaning? Perhaps you're looking for the triple word scrore in today's crossword puzzle as well?
  - ryanklee 11y ago
    > You should need to know the meaning of the word to play it How would you go about determining in a regulated fashion whether someone knows the meaning of a word? Would you have them offer a definition to be checked against an official dictionary? Would the definition given have to match the official dictionary definition word for word? Is so, wouldn't this simply force high-level scrabble players to memorize not only the official words but the official meanings themselves? And if perfect matching wouldn't be required, how much variation would be allowed and how would such variation be measured? There's no sense in falling back on the "just use the word in a sentence" proof, either. Because that's no proof at all, since, even if we dispense with all the problems consensus introduces, if the usage is contested, then some official dictionary definition will have to be referenced in the end. And then you're going to have to deal with the above mentioned issues anyways. The desire for a more natural, simple and organic Scrabble world in which any word played must be theoretically backended by a player's knowledge of its definition is, well, just asking for trouble.

logicrime 11y ago

That picture looks like a mugshot. When that link opened up I thought, "Gee, you'd think they'd mention that he was in prison!" That's really cool. I don't think that just because a person doesn't use a word regularly, that they don't 'deserve' the word or can't play the word on the board. There's THOUSANDS of words, nobody uses all of them. I hate this attitude towards people who play games over time, and they start showing signs of game theory during play, and suddenly it's 'not about the game anymore', but it's always BEEN about the game. The goal is to win!

Sven7 11y ago
The kids call it Deep Learning these days.
- logicrime 11y ago
  A lot of crap I see isn't Deep at all, it's just prior knowledge being re-applied to a more specific scenario.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

People's confusion about whether being too methodical about winning the game is against the game spirit are missing that games, especially spectator sports, have conflicting goals. As a player, your goal is to win the game, period. But for everyone else, including spectators and the whole support industry that is built around the game, it doesn't matter who wins. It matters only that the crowd is entertained. A player being too good makes the game boring, and so it is discouraged. You can see this dynamic more or less clearly in pretty much every sport (F-1 being a notable example). The rules of the game are so constructed as to "level the playing field", to mostly eliminate any kind of advantage a player may bring to the field - like better tech or supplements. The crowd needs to see fierce competition, where everything depends on the talent of players. But then again it can't be too obviously random. If people feel they can't predict the result, they won't enjoy it. Doesn't matter if the game is inherently random or not; it only needs to not look like it. Then there's danger. Safe sports are boring, but actual accidents will detract people from enjoying the show, so again you need to create a sense of imminent danger while minimizing any real chance of a problem. I mentioned F-1, because it's a notable example of a sport where all rules are constantly adjusted to ensure that you can't win by having better tech. Personally, I hate this whole showbusiness and the engineering of enjoyment. I would appreciate a game with rules set up so people would be free to develop better strategies and better tech in order to dominate.

Raurin 11y ago
Actually curious: is the goal of the F-1 rule changes to level the playing field? I'd heard it was to keep automakers on their toes, guiding the competition towards things that the general public wants, too, like gas efficiency. If I remember correctly, one of the more recent years saw a huge tank capacity reduction, ostensibly to force automakers to create powerful engines while maintaining some semblance of efficiency.
- danko 11y ago
  There are many, many objectives for which the F1 rules need to account. Competitive balance is one of them. Providing interesting and relevant technical challenges for automakers and teams is another (and was a major driver behind the recent switch to hybrid engines). In addition to those, you have safety, spectacle, cost-containment, logistical considerations, and about a thousand other goals that need to be incorporated. The FIA takes incredible flak for whatever they do because there are myriad tradeoffs between these objectives, and it's impossible to balance them all in a way that makes everyone happy.

archon 11y ago

We house-rule this. When playing Scrabble in my group of friends, we've added a rule that when a word is challenged, not only will the challenger look the word up in a dictionary, but the one who was challenged must correctly use the word in a sentence. It's more fun that way (for us), and it gives us all an incentive to go learn both the spelling and meaning of obscure words.

pbhjpbhj 11y ago
As a teenager I used to read the dictionary for fun - this is my preferred form of the game!

discardorama 11y ago

They say he memorized "the" Scrabble dictionary. Is there a standard dictionary? Where can I see it? It would certainly help resolve conflicts next time :D

ImpressiveWebs 11y ago
There's a few different dictionaries. There's the official tournament word list (TWL or OWL), which has had different versions. The latest, I believe, is OWL2014. I think the version before that was TWL2, IIRC. But those books are only available to tournament scrabble players who pay an annual fee. It's a bit elitist, but that's just how it is (unless it has changed lately). Other than that, you can pick up a regular Scrabble game dictionary, usually called OSPD, which will not have any off-colour words in it. Those can be bought in any book store and you can even search the OSPD on Scrabble's official website.

ImpressiveWebs 11y ago

I used to play online scrabble using a desktop app built by the Internet Scrabble Club (isc.ro)[1]. If you go to a website called cross-tables.com [2], you'll see tournament results and rankings of top players in the world. I've played online games against nearly half the players currently listed on the top 20 in North America and the world. I haven't played regularly for years, so my current Scrabble skills are pretty poor, even though I did beat many of those guys the odd time in the past. One day I even played a number of "speed" games (3 minute games, those were fun!) against Trey Wright, the winner of the National Scrabble Championship in 2004. IIRC, I beat him in one game, by a single point, while he thrashed me in the other 9 or so. In order to compete against these guys, you have to basically learn words for no other reason than to use them in Scrabble games. Word definitions are useless. It's a bit of an addiction, and quite pointless, but it's fun when you actually end up playing a bizarre 8-letter word (e.g. OENOMELS) and win the game because of it. It's absolutely true that language has little to do with being good at Scrabble. I used to play against Thai players who had very little knowledge of English but who knew way more English words than I did or ever will. Of course, when online, you pretty much have to expect that people will cheat. Most of the time, the cheaters are obvious, because good Scrabble players recognize cheating when compared to real human game play. As for Nigel, the guy's not human. I don't remember if he was ever on ISC (many of the top players were at some point), but everyone in the Scrabble world knows him and knows his uncanny word knowledge and Scrabble abilities. And if anyone's interested in reading about the Scrabble tournament scene and the associated lifestyles, check out Stefan Fatsis' book "Word Freak"[3], probably the best Scrabble book ever written (although it does contain quite a few f-words, thanks to the colorful personalities that it describes, which I wasn't crazy about). [1] http://www.isc.ro/ http://www.isc.ro/ [2] http://cross-tables.com/ http://cross-tables.com/ [3] http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Competitive/dp/0142002267 http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Compet...

vijayr 11y ago

He memorized the dictionary in 9 weeks. That is astounding