
A French Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French - archgoon
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-french-scrabble-champion-nigel-richards-doesnt-speak-french
======
realusername
(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
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
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.

~~~
ryanklee
> 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.

~~~
bweitzman
That's what judges are for. A sufficient definition should be obvious almost
always anyways.

~~~
ryanklee
> A sufficient definition

The question is: what determines sufficiency?

Edit: Further, definitions are often very difficult to produce even in
rudimentary form.

~~~
bweitzman
The property of sufficiency is itself what is obvious about a definition.

It's like pornography, you know it when you see it. And for the rare instances
that it's not obvious, there are judges to make a decision.

------
steve19
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.

~~~
clentaminator
I don't understand your analogy. The Scrabble problem is people not knowing
the words they use. The only Chess equivalent could be people not knowing or
understanding the moves they make. It has nothing to do with someone moving a
queen and not being a queen themselves.

~~~
steve19
Scrabble is not about words,anymore than monopoly is about business.

Scrabble is arranging a random selection of tiles into combinations in such a
way that score is maximized.

The tiles could have hexadecimal numbers on them and could be played against a
randomly generated dictionary of scored combinations. Much like you can play
chess with dragons figurines instead of castles or storm troopers instead
pawns.

It was as much to do with words as chess has to do with war in the middle
ages.

~~~
wainstead
> The tiles could have hexadecimal numbers on them and could be played against
> a randomly generated dictionary of scored combinations.

This is an intriguing assertion. The words of a natural language are far from
randomly generated. While I can invent new words like 'wobblery' or
'fandogonkified' they still follow patterns familiar from other words.

If I understand the Chomsky idea correctly, we are born with structures in our
brain ready to accept a new language. A human might have a hard time
memorizing a dictionary of randomly generated words in hexidecimal -- he or
she would have to resort to mnemonic techniques (peg lists, memory palace,
etc) to memorize that dictionary but it could be done. Further, it could be
done by any human who was dedicated to the task.

Whereas the system you describe involves brute force, much like the Deep Blue
approach to winning chess. And it's been shown that a group of people
collaborating together can defeat computers at chess! I think a lot of
interesting research could be done here (if it hasn't already) and it would
not surprise me if your assertion could be proven wrong (but I generally agree
with it).

~~~
TeMPOraL
The system GP describes doesn't involve brute force, it's just an accurate
description of Scrabble. It's about arranging tiles with point values in a way
score is maximized. That the scoring positions are not uniformly random but
follow some implicit language rules is something that helps people memorize /
derive the proper arrangements, but otherwise does not impact the game in any
way.

------
TeMPOraL
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.

~~~
adrianN
For the same reason Tour de France riders ride standardized bikes. You can
actually buy faster bikes than the ones used in the Tour de France (it's
difficult to also get the necessary legs though).

~~~
acomjean
Similar to sailing in the olympics: Everyone has the same model boat.

Not like the America's cup boat race where you need a huge R&D budget to
design a boat. Then someone shows up with a catamaran with a wing sail and
they have to regiger the rules again.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_at_the_2012_Summer_Oly...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_at_the_2012_Summer_Olympics_–_Laser)

~~~
pavel_lishin
Can you explain more about the America's Cup? The linked article didn't really
help me understand what the catamaran-with-wing-sail did...

~~~
acomjean
The Americas cup had rules about boat configuration. So technology started
driving the race. There was in the 1980s the australians showed up with a
secret weapon the "winged keel" on the boat "Australia II". It helped a lot
and raised the game for yachting.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_keel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_keel)

1988 rolls around, and a New Zeland team is trying for the cup. Giant boat. US
shows up in a catamaran. Catamarans are just faster.. The boats don't even
seem like they should race.
[http://www.yachtphoto.com/data/photos/176_1r1988_02.jpg](http://www.yachtphoto.com/data/photos/176_1r1988_02.jpg)

Lawsuits about the boat rules after the race was over. The rules didn't say
anything about having 2 hulls.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_America%27s_Cup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_America%27s_Cup)

[http://archive.sailingscuttlebutt.com/news/08/0212a/](http://archive.sailingscuttlebutt.com/news/08/0212a/)

Now americas cup is all about catamarans that seems to have.
[http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/A...](http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2013/09/Americas-Cup-1.jpg)

~~~
coldpie
Your comment was very interesting, thank you. Allow me to vent my spleen on a
different topic for a sec.

> Now americas cup is all about catamarans that seems to have.
> [http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/wp-
> content/uploads/2013/09/A...](http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/wp-
> content/uploads/2013/09/Americas-Cup-1.jpg)

God it pisses me off that Oracle has enough money to blow sponsoring shit like
this while simultaneously working to destroy the software development
industry. "We've got enough money to buy useful technologies and run them into
the ground, and to run lawsuits that are incredibly harmful to the software
industry for decades, _and_ enough left over on the side to race expensive
boats for fun." Fuck you, Oracle.

------
toolslive
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
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
A lot of Danish people play the English version of games like this.

~~~
emodendroket
I'm going to take a wild guess and a much greater percentage of Danes speak
English than anglophones speak Danish.

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

~~~
iwwr
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.

~~~
ThomPete
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?

------
maaarghk
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?

~~~
airza
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
> 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
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.

~~~
mistercow
> 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.

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

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

------
hkmurakami
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.

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

~~~
thesehands
One of the Chaps that helped Josh was Ed Cooke who founded Memrise
([http://www.memrise.com](http://www.memrise.com))

------
ImpressiveWebs
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-
Compet...](http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-
Competitive/dp/0142002267)

------
discardorama
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
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.

------
vijayr
He memorized the dictionary in 9 weeks. That is astounding

------
logicrime
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
The kids call it Deep Learning these days.

~~~
logicrime
A lot of crap I see isn't Deep at all, it's just prior knowledge being re-
applied to a more specific scenario.

