Scrabble

"In March 1998, the New York Times sponsored an exhibition match between MAVEN and a team consisting of world champion Joel Sherman and runner-up Matt Graham. It is not clear whether the collaboration helped or hindered the human side, but the computer won convincingly by a score of six wins to three. The result was not an anomaly. In July 1998, MAVEN played another exhibition match against Adam Logan (at AAAI-98), scoring nine wins to five."
- from A Gamut of Games, Jonathan Schaeffer, AI Magazine 22(3): Fall 2001, 29-46.

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A Gamut of Games

"The first documented Scrabble program appears to have been written by Stuart Shapiro and Howard Smith and was published in 1977 (Shapiro and Smith 1977). In the 1980s, a number of Scrabble programming efforts emerged, and by the end of the decade, it was apparent that these programs were strong players. ... At the first Computer Olympiad in 1989, the Scrabble winner was CRABwritten by Andrew Appel, Guy Jacobson, and Graeme Thomas (Leavy and Beal 1989). Second was TYLERwritten by Alan Frank. Subsequent Olympiads saw the emergence of TSP (Jim Homan), which edged out TYLER in the second and third Olympiads. All these programs were very good and quite possibly strong enough to be a serious test for the best players in the world. Part of their success was a result of the fast, compact Scrabble move generator developed by Andrew Appel (Appel and Jacobson 1988). Steven Gordon (1994) subsequently developed a move generator that was twice as fast but used five times as much storage. Brian Sheppard began working on a Scrabble program in 1983 and started developing MAVEN in 1986. ... In July 1998, MAVEN played another exhibition match against Adam Logan (at AAAI-98), scoring nine wins to five."

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By Jonathan Schaeffer, 2001
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Winning computer program created by graduate student beats world champion Scrabble player

Also see: Winning computer program created by graduate student beats world champion Scrabble player.By Kristen Sackley. DailyIllini.com (February 28, 2007). "[Mark] Richards, a graduate student, took a class with computer science Professor Eyal Amir, called Decision-Making Under Uncertainty (CS 598), and by doing a project on probability, he became interested in the strategy behind the game of Scrabble."I read about a previous Scrabble program that had been written, that had been 10 to 15 years ago," Richards said. He said he wanted to look into making a computer program better at winning the game of Scrabble by creating code that was better able to predict the letters the opponent had.... Richards came up with the idea of opponent modeling which is actually already used in many variations today, Amir said.... Inference Player ended up being such a successful program that it beat the computer world champion of Scrabble by an average of five points per game."

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Computers, Games and the Real World

Computers, Games and the Real World. By Matthew L. Ginsberg. Scientific American (special issue: Exploring Intelligence---Winter 1998). "More than just competing with people, game-playing machines complement human thinking by offering alternative methods to solving problems."

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World-championship-caliber Scrabble

World-championship-caliber Scrabble. By Brian Sheppard. In Artificial Intelligence, January 2002 (Volume: 134, Issue: 1-2). Abstract excerpt: "Maven was the first program to demonstrate this against human opposition. Scrabble is a game of imperfect information with a large branching factor. The techniques successfully applied in two-player games such as chess do not work here."

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Robot learns to play dirty Scrabble

Robot learns to play dirty Scrabble. New Scientist (January 16, 2007: Issue 2586, page 23; subscription req'd). "Beating people at Scrabble is already no contest for computer programs, which can easily memorise entire dictionaries. Now a Scrabble-playing program has gone one better by playing dirty. Developed by Eyal Amir and Mark Richards at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the program is able to predict which letter tiles other players hold, and use this information to choose moves which block a high-scoring word that an opponent might otherwise have played.... [Amir] presented the bot at a conference on artificial intelligence in Hyderabad, India this week."

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Hardware and Software

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Scrabble - computer Scrabble players

Source code and related links for computer Scrabble players.

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2012
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Scrabble Source Code

This is a resource of the wordgame-programmers@egroups.com mailing list.

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