Re:Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter...
by yompers888 on Monday May 23, 2016 @02:21PM
(#11755752)
On an unimportant note, jokers are not included in poker, nor in almost any other game. It is my understanding that they exist to use as replacement cards in the case of a lost or damaged card (rather than having to throw out the deck.)
Re:Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter...
by splonk on Monday May 23, 2016 @06:43PM
(#11757623)
Jokers are actually used in occasional uncommonly played poker games (certain variants of 5 card draw). For the most part those games haven't been played much in public card rooms since 10-20 years ago but you can occasionally come across a game.
Yep, Scrabble is a hidden-information, stochastic game (the opponent's future tiles are also randomly drawn).
Scrabble is probably more similar to poker and other card games in that respect. The key difference is that the distribution of letter tiles is skewed: the number of tiles is not the same for each letter [1]. This is different than, say, playing cards, where you get exactly 4 of each card (plus the, I think two, Jokers).
Which means it's easier to make a prediction for what's coming out of the opponent's bag, possibly (they're more likely to see the more common tiles).
>> they are applying the Chess strategy of thinking n-moves ahead
Well, that's a universal m-player game strategy, not specific to chess. Minimax and all that, ja? Did I misunderstand what you mean?
Except of course in this case the optimal strategy for Scrabble seems to be under dispute (long or short words best?) and so programming an AI player with minimax might not be that straightforward.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions