Humiliation

I like playing Scrabble-like games and for a time I used to play on my Samsung phone using an app called WORD. However, there an annoying two minute lapse between my making a move and the app responding. There were also intrusive advertisements and in the end I stopped playing. Having recently acquired an iPhone, I downloaded an app called WORD MASTER that responds instantly once a make a play and there are only small, unobtrusive ads at the top of the screen. There are four levels: easy, medium, hard and master.

I set the play level to master and won three games before losing one. I felt good. The problem with playing on the phone is that the battery drains because I like to ponder long and hard over the best possible move. That set me thinking about playing on my always plugged-in laptop using just a web browser. I came across a Scrabble-like game called WORD SCRAMBLE with an interface as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

There are five levels: one to five. I confidently set the level to 5 and began playing. Never have a suffered a more crushing defeat. The computer achieved a score of over 600 while I barely made it over 200. I adjusted the level to 4 the next time but was similarly crushed, although not quite as cruelly. See Figure 2.

Figure 2

As an exercise in diminishing the size of one's ego, this is one of the best. I think the Scrabble apps on the Google Play store and Apple's App store are careful not to crush their human opponents too devastatingly or else people would avoid using them. I'm sure an algorithm kicks in when the computer takes too much of a lead so that subsequent moves are less than optimal and the human has a chance to catch up. There are no such algorithms at work in this online game. 

Reluctantly, I set the level to 1 and this time I reigned supreme, scoring 575 against the computer's measly 231. I guess I can try level 2 next and see how I fare. What really turned the game around was the massive boost I received by using DJINN as shown in Figure 3. This close proximity of TW, TL and DW is quite different to traditional Scrabble.

Figure 3

Notice how the 15 x 15 game board in Figure 1 is different to the traditional 15 x 15 Scrabble board. See Figure 4.

Figure 4: Vintage 1948 Scrabble Board

An interesting twist on the game is explained in the following article:

New AI Scrabble mod only allows words that don’t exist

A festive game of Scrabble is a time-tested method of surviving the extended company of obnoxious family members. But losing to a crabby relative can make their company even worse.

But this year, uncle Nigel (name changed to protect identity) will face a different challenge. Thanks to a new AI version of the classic board game, his distressing knowledge of the dictionary will be of no use at all — because real words no longer count.

The BLABRECS system is the brainchild of Max Kreminski, an AI researcher and game designer. He describes his creation as “like Scrabble but worse.”

The browser-based tool is designed to run alongside a regular Scrabble game. But under the new rules, you can only play words that the AI says don’t exist — but sound as if they could.

The system checks whether a word is meaningless by running it through a Markov model trained on the ENABLE list of more than 173,000 words, which is used as a reference dictionary for numerous word games.

“It looks at the statistical patterns of letter sequences in English words and uses this information to determine how likely a sequence of letters is to be a real English word,” Kreminski explains on the BLABRECS website. “Then it rejects both real dictionary words and fake words that it deems insufficiently plausible.”

Kreminski admits that the AI sometimes accepts real words as gobbledeegook, particularly inflected forms of base words and proper nouns that Scrabble generally prohibits.

When this happens, he suggests playing by the spirit of BLABRECS — whatever that means to you:

Is the game primarily about exploring the vast ‘shadow English’ implied by the statistical distribution of letter sequences, or is it about the inherent absurdity of an external authority presuming to dictate your language to you? Either interpretation seems valid to me.

Kreminiski is also considering adding AI opponents to future versions of the system, so you wouldn’t have to interact with toxic relatives at all. Roll on Christmas 2021.

This has particular appeal to me because, while lying in bed before sleeping, I often try to think of monosyllabic rhyming words that begin with the progressive letters of the alphabet. For example, words that rhyme with "ake". I'd begin with "ache" and then progress to "bake" and "cake" before reaching "dake". A far as I know this isn't an English word but it sounds perfectly feasible and I've often thought about assigning a meaning to such a non-word. Figure 5 shows what the result of entering "dake" into BLABRECS.

Figure 5: https://mkremins.github.io/blabrecs/

The site suggests the following approach to making use of its features:

Get together your regular SCRABBLE supplies and pull up this page in a web browser. Then play SCRABBLE as normal, but before you play a word, use the "test a word..." box at the top of the page to check whether the AI will let you play it. Remember, you can only play words that the AI approves!

When you find a legal word to play, hit the "Play It" button to add this word to the lexicon. As you play, you can write in definitions for all the words you've invented in the "Meaning" textbox next to each word. The player who comes up with the best definition for a word can add half of that word's points to their SCRABBLE score at the end of the game.

What meaning might be assigned to "dake"? The Urban Dictionary comes to our aid here. The entry that gets the most up votes is as follows:

Dake 

Used to describe one interesting as hell dude.

A dake never fails, unless it's failing at failing.

A dake is always calm and collected and never loses his temper.

A dake encompasses the word "awesome", and succeeds in any venture that he takes on, overcomes any challenge in his way. 

Wow... did you see that guy? He would have been named dake, but his parents didn't want everyone to know how successful and dominating he was just by hearing it.

By ladyfalcon November 28, 2011

  The github site also explains the origin of the "word" BLABRECS:

Why is it called BLABRECS? 

I generated every possible permutation of the word SCRABBLE and asked an early version of the AI to sort them from least to most statistically likely. BRABLECS won out by a significant margin, beating not only the real word SCRABBLE but also my hand-designed previous title BESCRALB. Then I switched the L and the R because BLABRECS sounds better and I'm not about to let a computer tell me what to do.

On the subject of AI, the two most popular AIs for Scrabble are Maven and Quackle. To quote from Wikipedia:

Maven is a computer opponent for the game created by Brian Sheppard. The official Scrabble computer game in North America uses a version of Maven as its artificial intelligence and is published by Atari. Outside North America, the official Scrabble computer game is published by Ubisoft. Quackle is an open-source alternative to Maven of comparable strength, created by a five-person team led by Jason Katz-Brown. A Qt cross-platform version of Quackle is available on GitHub.

Figure 6 shows an example of a Scrabble game in progress using Quackle, an open-source program. The first few plays are JOKED 8D 50, followed by REV(O)TInG E5 94 and YEX# F4 56. The # means a word valid in games using the British-originated word list (CSW) only.

Figure 6