Sarah Woodland in the U.K. runs a team of therapy ponies, bringing "joy" and "humor" to senior citizens in need of a mental health boost and a bit of company. A married couple who have long enjoyed the game of Scrabble both together and separately before they even met are never at a loss for words -- and attribute their wedded bliss in part to their love of the nostalgic game. They're still playing in tournaments built around the game decades after they began doing so. Graham Harding and his wife Helen Harding, both in their 60s, have been married for over 20 years. They met in the 1990s at Scrabble tournaments, as news agency SWNS reported.

Since Scrabble adopted an official lexicon in 1978, one thing has been constant: People have never stopped arguing about what is or isn't a word. Players have defended the game by noting that its letter strings--from AA (a kind of Hawaiian lava) to ZZZ (an interjection for sleep)--could be found in a bunch of standard North American dictionaries, books that have been used through the years to compile and revise Scrabble's tournament word list. But after an update last month introduced dozens of suspect words, riling up the community of competitive players, that's becoming harder to do. The linguistic tumult began in September, when the organization that maintains the word list used in club and tournament Scrabble, NASPA Games, published a draft of its update. The NASPA list includes all of the words in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, the go-to source for living-room and app players in North America, plus a lot more.

In the mid-1970s, top players in an emerging tournament Scrabble scene persuaded the game's corporate owner to adopt a universal lexicon for competition. Players manually scraped five standard college dictionaries, recording every unique two- through eight-letter word (plus inflections) that met the game's rules. When the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary was published, in 1978, players rejoiced. "You can retire the boxing gloves and put up your swords," the Scrabble Players Newspaper wrote. "You now have an arbiter to settle all arguments."

I thought hanging out with a Scrabble-playing robot would be a nice, chill time. I even imagined they would be useful at nursing homes, as therapy companions to elderly residents. Scrabble bot's official name is actually the Intelligent Vision System for Companion Robots, made by Taiwanese research company ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute). It uses a combination of AI, 3D vision, and hand-eye coordination to pour its opponent a cup of coffee, and then mercilessly crush them at Scrabble. The AI determines which combination of letter tiles can create the highest-scoring word, and tallies up the opponents score accurately as well.

Look, there's plenty of boring industrial robots on the floor of the Las Vegas convention center for CES. But I've got to hand it to the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) -- it really knows how to make a demo fun and interactive. The company combined a number of its technologies into a robot that is able to sit and play Scrabble against a human opponent ... and win. This isn't some "AI" playing you in a digital world, to be clear. The humanoid machine, powered by what ITRI calls its Intelligent Vision System for Companion Robots, plays a physical (if slightly modified) game of Scrabble.

The BBC's Dave Lee challenged a robot to a game of Scrabble at CES 2018.

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. This aggressive gaming style gives it the edge over previous Scrabble programs, which focus solely on maximising their own scores. To predict what tiles other players hold, Amir and Richards's program begins by eliminating those tiles that have already been played. It then narrows down the possibilities by assuming that the tiles left on an opponent's rack after they make a move do not include any letters that could have been used to form higher-scoring words than the word the opponent actually played.

In 1950, Claude Shannon published his seminal work on how to program a computer to play chess. Since then, developing game-playing programs that can compete with (and even exceed) the abilities of the human world champions has been a long-sought-after goal of the AI research community. In Shannon's time, it would have seemed unlikely that only a scant 50 years would be needed to develop programs that play world-class backgammon, checkers, chess, Othello, and Scrabble. These remarkable achievements are the result of a better understanding of the problems being solved, major algorithmic insights, and tremendous advances in hardware technology. Computer games research is one of the important success stories of AI. This article reviews the past successes, current projects, and future research directions for AI using computer games as a research test bed.