SCRABBLE

The #1 Word Game

Scrabble is a word game with all rights owned by Hasbro. I've treated the game as a mixed-language programming challenge involving some PHP and a lot of Javascript. My demo here is simply for watching and learning and will never be actually "playable". Hasbro offers online Scrabble—I play "Scrabble Go" in classic mode and can recommend it.

"Computer Scrabble" 1983 Sinclair Research

I remember my delight when in 1983 I saw "Computer Scrabble" (£14.95) on my ZX Spectrum computer. While the computer "thought" it displayed the words it was finding and the penny dropped that computers were going to change the world. To my amusement one of the words it played was "farting"—computers have no shame! (See Interesting Facts section below).

My instinctive response was, "Amazing! I need to learn how to do that." And so a programmer was born.

Current implementations of Scrabble do not display their thinking in the same awe-inspiring way. I've just spent a happy week coding in an attempt to recreate that original magic. I've used my own curated lexicon of about 32,000 valid Scrabble words, so all the weird Scrabble words from the full 192,000+ word-list won't show up. Um, apart from all the Q-without-U words and the no-vowel words (it's a Scrabble thing). Your vocabulary is probably around 35,000 words - yet I doubt you would be able to beat this.

My lexicon includes all allowable 2 and 3 letter Scrabble words. You are allowed to refer to the twos during over-the-board play and these words are essential to good Scrabble gameplay. My demo often gets over 700 points per game—yet you will know almost every word it plays.

Scrabble Demo

"My Scrabble Demo" 2021 Jet5

Interesting facts

Shakespeare used 25,000 different words in his writings—more than 10 entire years of the Wall St Journal (20,000).

A 1988 paper "The World's fastest Scrabble Program" reviews various algorithms for implementing computer Scrabble. The authors (funded) then create what they claim is the "fastest possible" algorithm. Nowadays computing power and available memory have advanced to the point that their work is rather meaningless. Yet their algorithm "freezes" when the rack includes 2 blanks: they say this is ok because it's rare—hmmm. They also state that they implemented no "strategies" because a big reliable wordlist can beat anybody anyway. Poor show, at least if you have a Q and a U maybe hold on to the U if you're not playing the Q. A few simple strategies would have been worth the effort.

"Syzygy" is the word which describes 3 celestial bodies in a line, as happens during any eclipse. It is a word that has only 2 uses: astronomy and Scrabble.

The Hasbro chairman announced that the third Scrabble Dictionary would be published with a number of "offensive" words removed. These included "farting", "boobies", and "jew". There was outcry from the National Scrabble Association which was not consulted and they were reinstated. However recently 236 words deemed "offensive" were removed from the Scrabble dictionary to make the game more "inclusive". Rather arbitrary: I see that "piss" is out but "pee" is still in. So Scrabble, unbelievably and sadly is now virtue-signalling. There may be a case for excluding words which can only be racist slurs, but would anybody really be offended by the word "fart"? I propose two versions of Scrabble: "grown-up" and "kiddie".