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."

You can learn a lot about a person from the way they play Scrabble. Do they show off their SAT vocabulary or only know dirty words? Are they rule-sergeants or are they so competitive that they will stop at nothing to beat someone who is half their age? It seems his Scrabble strategy involves aggressive rule bending in order to win a game against a high school-age opponent. SEE ALSO: After losing trust of its users, Facebook assigns them a'trustworthiness' score This little Zuckerian anecdote comes to us from an extensive New Yorker profile about the Facebook CEO's approach toward the myriad problems currently facing the social network, and whether he's equipped to solve them.

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.

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.

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.

In Shannon's time, it would have seemed Around this time, Arthur Samuel began work the capabilities of computational intelligence. By 1958, Alan Newell and Herb Simon the game world with the real world--the game had begun their investigations into chess, of life--where the rules often change, the which eventually led to fundamental results scope of the problem is almost limitless, and for AI and cognitive science (Newell, Shaw, and the participants interact in an infinite number Simon 1958). An impressive lineup to say the of ways. Games can be a microcosm of the real least! Indeed, one of the early goals of AI was to and chess programs could play at a build a program capable of defeating the level comparable to the human world champion. This These remarkable accomplishments are the challenge proved to be more difficult than was result of a better understanding of the anticipated; the AI literature is replete with problems being solved, major algorithmic optimistic predictions. It eventually took insights, and tremendous advances in hardware almost 50 years to complete the task--a technology. The work on computer remarkably short time when one considers the games has been one of the most successful and software and hardware advances needed to visible results of AI research. The results are truly of the progress in building a world-class amazing. Even though there is an exponential program for the game is given, along with a difference between the best case and the brief description of the strongest program. The histories are necessarily case (Plaat et al. 1996). Games reports the past successes where computers realizing the lineage of the ideas.