[zem]

I'm a competitive scrabble player, and I suspect it will be less than a decade (and possibly well less) before we have an AI that comfortably outclasses the best human players. (It might never be "unbeatable" due to the luck factor, but it could well, e.g. win 29 games out of every 30). However, it won't affect my enjoyment of the game in any way - it's already clear that board games in general are solvable by an "explore lots of moves with many levels of lookahead" strategy; the thrill lies in the fact that humans playing across a board clearly have to use different techniques to achieve the same result, and you're competing against other humans to see who can do it best.

Indeed, much of the current excitement around AI playing programs lies in the fact that computers are too slow to do the exhaustive brute force tree search either; they need a lot of very clever valuation and pruning techniques to explore more of the tree in less time. It's just a different form of cleverness than what humans do, and there is a lot of feedback between the two communities, with human players helping programmers identify good heuristics, and then computer players uncovering new possibilities for humans to incorporate into their play.

[mrob]

How good does it have to be to count as "comfortably outclasses"? Wikipedia claims Maven (Scrabble AI) was beating top humans in 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maven_%28Scrabble%29

[zem]

top humans have been improving too; i'd estimate that quackle is stronger than most human players today, but the very best (especially nigel richards! https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-makes-nigel-richar...) can hold their own against it. i'd like to see the top-level-human win rate drop below 25% before i'd call us decisively outmatched, and below 10% before it hits the "don't even expect to win a game unless you're an expert" stage.

also, there's an (afaik) unexplored area of scrabble AI where you take into account the fact that some plays are harder to spot than others, and some words less likely to be in your scrabble vocabulary, so if you're playing a weaker opponent you can play risky moves that might cost you against an expert but will win big against a weaker player. unlike in go, this really matters because tournament scrabble uses spread as a tiebreaker; learning how to not just win but win big against weaker players is an important skill in some tournaments.