AssFace's Journal: fun idea

Well, this is likely only fun in the sense that Slashdot people might appreciate it. I know my fiancee doesn't think it sounds at all fun.

I like Scrabble. I play it everyday. I proposed to my fiancee via Scrabble. I take digital pictures of every game that I have played the past few weeks (and will continue to do so and am starting up a part of my site to log them).

I don't win all of the time - I usually break 280, but my fiancee pretty much always breaks 300 and sometimes 400 (I think about 5 times that I can remember).
I'm just not very good at spelling - I can never remember how anything is spelled. I frequently transpose letters, and if it is something where that is feasible sometimes then I will always get it wrong (friend/freind, Michael/Micheal - those look equally wrong/right to me).

But I love to watch the shapes that unfold from the game.

I decided long ago that I would create a Scrabble "heat map" - that would play thousands of games and keep track of which spots on the board are played the most and then color them accordingly - the more frequently used spots are a hotter color than the spots that are less used.
Obviously the center tile would be always played, and then others are less played.
The tiles are naturally going to gravitate towards the triple/double word/letter squares.
So if you generate a map and then reposition those squares, you should be able to replay the games and then get a different heat map that is more biased towards their new positions.

The human logic behind playing the game is relatively easy - but translating that to programming has been unusually hard for me.
Getting a program to play like a little kid is easy - but getting it to play the way a good player does is harder - and that is what I am striving for.

Then I thought about just brute forcing it - effectively just toss letters at the board, see if they all form words, if so, that is a legit board - repeat.
That way you could move through the entire solution space of Scrabble.
But that space is huge.
Well, I should say that the possible space is *HUGE* and then the limits within that due to actual words is much much smaller - but still huge.

Assuming I am remembering my math correctly, the total possible solutions ignoring if there are actual words on the board or not is:
225!/(100!*125!)
That number is bigger than Excel will allow, and I'm just gonna go ahead and assume it is hugeness.

Assuming that I can write a program that can generate (notice I don't say "play") and then analyze a game for it being "legit" so that it can do about 100 of these in a second... then that would take... way longer than normal time allows for us to be around for - along the same timespan of encryption...
Which makes me think of distributed.net - they break encryption via a large network of comptuers.

That way it would be feasible to keep track of only legit boards (using the standard competition Scrabble dictionary, which I have a digital copy of) and know exactly the bounds of the scrabble solution space via brute force.
You could look at your end game and say to your game partner "oh, we just played solution #575,845,903 - cool"

Anyway - I have some code done - but the idea of storing that much data makes my stomach hurt.

As a result, I will keep on and finish the heatmap version and then if I feel like it, move on to a distributed project.
I am currently working in Perl, but I might go ahead and just do it in C since I will have to move that way anyway soon enough.

rotation

[heliocentric]

I don't know scrabble that well, but is rotation an issue? Rotation of the board in tic-tac-toe (as well as reflection but obviously that only applies in the rare set of entirely palendromes that line up) can reduce your space. You mentioned something about spaces on the board so my thinking about that game where you dump out the letters from a cup and form words in a certian amount of time doesn't apply. If the empty board itself is rotated does it remain the same?

Fun:
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The servic

Re:rotation

[AssFace]

You are thinking of Boggle - another game that I love, but suck at.

In Scrabble, the board is symmetrical so that if you have it upside down, the squares are the same - but if you have it 90 degrees off center, then it wouldn't work.

So once you start a game, the board remains constant the entire time.

Re:rotation

[heliocentric]

We are straying from your subject big time, but isn't boggle the one where you have like a 6x6 thing that holds the letters and you can't use space beyond that?

I'm thinking of the one with the little green cup and you just use the table. Perhaps I'm confusing things again, please enlighten me or wordsmith =)

Re:rotation

[AssFace]

Oh, yes, Boggle is the limited thing - I'm not familiar with the game you speak of.

Scrabble doesn't normally allow you to dump the letters out onto the board - but in terms of generating all of the possible boards, that is essentially all that you need to do, over and over.

And then as with any distributed computing system - there could be some fun ststs and some fun ways to display said stats.

Re:rotation

[heliocentric]

I think it's called "Ad-Lib" however the 'net searches I have done for that title have found word games but they all require a board. While being of the same era as the game I remember (1970s) this wasn't it. It had a green cup and a time limit (through use of little hour glass thing with sand) but there was no restriction through a board, you could keep making large things. But like boggle it was single player at a time with all of the letters and the letters were on cubes and you rolled the dice/cubes