| >> If I understand this correctly, they are applying the Chess strategy of thinking
n-moves ahead to Scrabble, where the opponent's tiles are hidden and ones own
future tiles are mostly unknown. 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 |