What Good Looks Like: The Expected Value of a Scrabble Rack

“Drat…..I just can’t make anything good with these tiles….”

If you haven’t muttered this under your breath a few times, you likely haven’t played Scrabble very much.But are you muttering this because of a mental block or truly bad tiles? Within the vast universe of possible Scrabble racks, what does “good” look like?

The serious Scrabble player would state that the effective value of a hand depends on where you are in the game. The early game favors scrabble racks that “play well with others”, giving you relatively large words with common letters that can easily be patched onto an open board. The end game favors prefixes, suffixes, and small words you can sneak into an open space. Bonus squares and the opportunity to build on large (5 – 7 letter) existing words also boost your score. All of this is true.

But here is a simpler way to approach the question: what if we look at the highest scoring word you can create using just the letters in your rack?

Mathematically, this question became: for a standard Scrabble rack, how many points of words (aka. the expected value) should the average Scrabble rack contain?

Continue reading “What Good Looks Like: The Expected Value of a Scrabble Rack”

Building Sustainable Websites

There is a stigma to monetizing your side projects. I take exception to this. Building useful software is hard work. Maintaining it takes even more work. Adding a revenue stream to a project helps make it sustainable. This is good for everyone involved.

This is a big issue in the open source community. Github and Google code are littered with the remains of half completed and unmaintained libraries. This is a loss to everyone involved: the volunteers that built the library, the brave souls who were early adopters, and the community at large. And when the open source ecosystem fails for a particular space, our end-users have no choice except to turn to a corporate provider.

Continue reading “Building Sustainable Websites”

Scrabble Helpers – Striking The Right Balance

One of the more interesting elements of building a site like this working through the right level of “assistance” to provide a player. The goal, of course, is to make the game more fun for a player and (being pragmatic) do so in  fashion which perpetuates their interest in the game. A lot of this thinking went into the design behind our words with friends helper .

We opted for a minimalist approach – enter your letters and we give you a list of possible words. The player is free to play them how they wish – keeping them involved in the strategy of how to put down their tiles while we help out with crunching through the dictionary of potential words. This gives a nice balance of help without making the game too easy…

Continue reading “Scrabble Helpers – Striking The Right Balance”