Computer Players

Scrabble has been an object of interest for many artificial intelligence researchers and enthusiasts. As already outlined in the previous article, playing the word with the highest score is not always the best strategy, so teaching a computer to play well requires knowledge of a number of much more subtle strategies.

The game is especially interesting to implement because it can be broken down into two phases that are, from a computer's perspective, fundamentally different. The first lasts from the beginning of the game up until the last tile in the bag is drawn. During this phase, it is not known what the other players' tiles are, and the game has an element of randomness. However, when the last tile is drawn and the bag is empty, the computer can deduce from the overall letter distribution what letters must be on the other players' racks. In particular, when playing against a single opponent, the computer knows exactly the tiles on your rack and thus what your possible moves are for the rest of the game.

The best known Scrabble AI player is Maven, created by Brian Sheppard. The official Scrabble computer game in North America uses this method of artificial intelligence and is released by Atari. Outside of North America, the official Scrabble computer game is released by Mattel.