
Nigel Richards, The Best Scrabble Player - ryan_j_naughton
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-makes-nigel-richards-the-best-scrabble-player-on-earth/
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300bps
_Richards has won an estimated $215,000 in his tournament career_

Here you have a person that has dedicated their life to playing a game
professionally and has attained literally the top ranking in he world. Yet in
his entire career has made less than many software engineers make in a year.

That is why I stopped participating in Scrabble tournaments years ago. Casual
play is fun but tournament play is about memorizing a dictionary. It was less
fun than work and paid horribly.

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vacri
The article certainly doesn't sound like he has dedicated his life to
professional play, and the recompense is simply a factor of how much economic
pull the game has - if people aren't going to shell out to watch other people
play, no prize money for you.

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300bps
_The article certainly doesn 't sound like he has dedicated his life to
professional play_

Read the book "Word Freak" and you'll read all about the people that win
Scrabble tournaments. It's really sad.

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mertd
Why is it sad?

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judk
It's also on Netflix. Scrabble champs have no job and now money and scrape
together funds to travel to events. It seems like a lifestyle that no one
withing a few standard deviations of neurotypical would desire.

Elite Scrabble feels an unrewarding life goal.

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mrb
_" there are more than 16 billion ways to draw seven tiles"_

Wrong. Even assuming the order matter (which is false, ABCDEFG is the same
draw as GFEDCBA) and even assuming there are 7 tiles of each letter and 7
blanks in a bag (which is false), that would be 27^7 = 10.5 billion ways.
Because these assumptions are false, the real number of combinations is lower.

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kqr2
For calculating the number of combinations, it looks like they are simply
using 100 choose 7, or C(100, 7) which yields 16,007,560,800.

[http://what-are-the-chances.blogspot.com/2008/02/7-letter-wo...](http://what-
are-the-chances.blogspot.com/2008/02/7-letter-words-and-8-card-suits.html)

~~~
psychometry
That doesn't take into account repeated letters. You actually want the number
of 7-combinations of the multiset { A * 5, B * 3, C * 4, ... } or whatever the
letter frequencies are. That's for the first draw from the bag.

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ghshephard
Given that he has a better Scrabble rating than a computer algorithm, there
has to be an element of poker at this level - otherwise if it were pure
probability and memorization of the words (which a computer would have done
perfectly, with no room for error), then a human could not outrank a computer.

I'm wondering (for the professional scrabble players out there) - do you play
words differently depending on your competitor? That is, do you leave a
vulnerability with some players, that you wouldn't with others? Or do you play
the same game every time.

I was surprised that element of Nigel Richard's Scrabble game wasn't
discussed.

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icelancer
It could just be that the Scrabble AI is not sufficiently advanced to explore
the entirety of the decision tree. For all board states X, there are many deep
trees that increase in complexity at boards X+1, X+2, etc (though it's
arguable that it decreases in complexity in the late game, or can a game can
be played "closed" to reduce the chances of bingos).

It may not be purely metagaming that causes the difference between AI and
humans; the algorithm probably plays a far-from-perfect game.

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thret
The article claims there are just shy of 200,000 scrabble words.

Why would it be so complex? The key is to use all 7 of your letters. The
subset of valid words containing all 7 letters you hold shouldn't be that
large, surely the board can be exhaustively searched to fit them?

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Strilanc
You don't just want good words, you want to position yourself so your next
move is also a good word. So you don't just have to iterate over the current
board, you have to iterate over all _possible_ upcoming boards.

But it's even worse than that! You want to set up your opponent for a bad
move, and vice versa, so you're trying to infer each others' tiles from past
moves and bluffing starts to matter. So you _also_ have to reason about
counterfactual games where your opponent would have done the same thing,
meaning you have to care about the _entire_ game tree instead of just the sub-
tree you're in...

In the general case, solving games involving partial information requires
super-exponential time. It's no picnic. (Of course in practice we use
approximations, and those can work quite well.)

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thret
Good point regarding setting up for double/triple word scores, however I doubt
there is much soul reading or bluffing in scrabble - I think the cost of
making a sub-optimal move is too great, you'd need to be very sure that it
hurt your opponent even more than yourself.

Also although the remaining letters are known, your selection is random. I
don't know how you could possibly choose between words to maximize your next
move when you don't know what letters you will get?

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icelancer
> I don't know how you could possibly choose between words to maximize your
> next move when you don't know what letters you will get?

Your selection is random amongst a determined pool of tiles. You can easily
maximize your move even if the move is not 100% deterministic. The fact that
there is a random factor does not mean strategy is useless.

This is trivially true in a lot of cases, but sticking with games: The
dealer's concealed (hole) card in Blackjack is not known precisely but by
counting cards, you can determine the best play even if the effect is small.

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lifeisstillgood
Because he can make a word out of O X Y G E N ?

Edit: see one of the earliest Simpsons episodes

Edit: it is interesting that the articles assumption has been he is better
than current algorithms and so better than algorithms can be. This just
indicates to me a lack of time and research into the correct algorithm.

That's not meant as a trivial throwaway comment but that in pretty much every
area of human endeavour we have lots of headroom for new algorithms.

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kp25
So, It seems like No Human Player could beat Nigel, time to take over the
challenge of building a better Scrabble AI than Nigel is!

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noswi
Well, you can still jump in on the very fun and competetive Al Zimmerman's
challenge (which ends in about a week, though), the current task is exactly
about solving the given Scrabble sets in the best possible way:
[http://www.azspcs.net/Contest/AlphabetCity](http://www.azspcs.net/Contest/AlphabetCity)

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DrBazza
Competition scrabble games are typically more open, where players lay out
longer words to allow more opportunities to play more words and larger scores
to develop. After that it's vocabulary and experience.

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contingencies
Isn't _Chlorodyne_ a brand name and therefore capitalized? I would have
rejected that. By the way, massive scrabble fan here. If anyone finds
themselves in south-west China hit me up for a game!

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kevinwang
Can he actually beat the AI in a head-to-head match?

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zem
yes (as can a lot of the other top players). though due to the element of luck
in the game, the right question is whether he would have an overall winning
record after repeatedly playing quackle (also yes; as of now he's definitely
better than the state of the art ai)

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quotient
Well, so, what makes Nigel Richards the best Scrabble Player on Earth? The
article does not even answer its own leading question, which is enormously
disappointing (though it is otherwise interesting). There are a couple
humorous quotations, and literally two or three sentences that could be
interpreted as conjecture as to why Nigel Richards is the best player by such
a phenomenally large margin: some loose statements about knowing relevant
probabilities.

This article was a perfectly interesting read about how Richards utterly
dominates Scrabble, but unfortunately plagued by a totally misleading
headline: I was expecting an answer.

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michaelt
Well, the article does say "I try to score points. The goal is to score more
points than your opponent." and "I’m not sure there is a secret. It’s just a
matter of learning the words."

Perhaps that (incredibly unsatisfying) explanation is actually true?

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thret
There's a 'how to play chess' book I can't recall the name of, with similarly
useless advice:

Rule #2: Make the right move.

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Isofarro
That worked for Smyslov (7th World Chess Champion), who once quipped:

"I will make 40 good moves and if you are able to do the same, the game will
end in a draw."

