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?

Fortunately, this question is easily answered with a little computer modeling (described at the end of this article). We simulated drawing tiles from the standard scrabble distribution and fed them into a word solver program. This program identifies the word with the highest score which could be constructed from each set of tiles. When we tallied up the results after 10,000 iterations, here is how the points were distributed:

Key points from this analysis:

• The median points value per scrabble hand came out between 9 – 10 points.
• Almost everybody had something….hands with less than six points were rare…
• Bingo’s were fairly common: about 12% of scrabble hands could be sorted into words which would consume all seven letters if placed on the board “standalone”.

So the next time you’re stuck looking at a rack of letters you can’t seem to reassemble into a reasonable word, take hope! Statistically, there’s at least one word hiding in there and in many case…a rather nice one!

Or as us math nerds like to say: A Solution Exists

Details of the Analysis:

This analysis treats scrabble in a manner similar to a game of seven card “stud” poker; select seven tiles (cards) and see what you can make with them. Instead of poker’s set of possible hands, we’re looking for English words. To implement this idea, we used Python to build a simulation model: we randomly selected seven tiles from the scrabble letter distribution. These seven tiles were fed them into a dictionary search program that identifies the words that can be built from those tiles. We scored the words and selected the highest word. If the word used all seven tiles, we gave credit for a scrabble bingo (+50 points). Since computer time is cheap, we repeated the process 10,000 times.

The post What Good Looks Like: The Expected Value of a Scrabble Rack appeared first on Hanging Hyena.

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.

To Advertise or Not, That Is The Question…

This site started as an experiment and family project. While it has always been of commercial value to us, the initial gains were indirect. It opened up some great doors. It also gave us a safe place to validate the underlying technology. LoadRunner can’t compete with a couple thousand crazed scrabble fans!

However, there is a certain amount of recurring work and expense involved in maintaining a site. On the low end, you need to keep the spammers in check and maintain a minimal level of content/link creation to keep Google interested. On the higher end, you need to respond to changes in the underlying games and new game launches. After a few months, this can become a burden. It competes with family time and new projects, chewing up the credit card a bit.

Which is the first revelation – the project already was “work”, I just wasn’t noticing it in the early stages of the site. Once competing priorities arose, it became harder to rationalize doing this work. This isn’t unique to this project, by the way. The same issue occurs with most of the lesser open source projects and weekend hacks. Unless you have a huge mission, engaged audience, and strong team – many projects flounder at this point. Start strong, fade away to nothing.

This site took an important step towards self-sufficiency last week. We started displaying ads. The purpose of this article isn’t to brag, by the way. Hangman solvers aren’t a “get rich quick” niche – cash hungry internet marketers should keep walking

What a Revenue Stream Really Provides: Freedom to Grow…

Most of our vacations involve trips to the beach, which involves a 6 – 8 hour drive (with small children, which only makes it longer). This usually tends to be pretty good “thinking time”. This site was conceived on our last Thanksgiving trip and we cranked out a couple of improvements over Christmas before we launched. This trip was no different – once we settled down into the long drive across the South Georgia countryside, I started thinking about the stuff I wanted to build next.

That’s when it hit me. I have a budget now, at least in the eyes of my wife and the IRS. Not a big one – I still need to show up at work on Monday – but enough to cover part of the expenses of “trying something new”. Want to redesign an interface and spend $50 bucks on a Javascript book? No Sweat. Need to start a secondary site (new domain,  another hosting account)? That $100 is covered. Feeling the desire to spend a couple of days building a new solver? “Hey Honey, we might be able to fund a date night or two from a new solver…” That goes over a lot better with your significant other than “I’m going to hide in the basement and cut some code, see you in a week” – just a tip for you married guys

The ads don’t generate much, just enough to cover our costs. That flips this site from being a burden to a net benefit. Worth protecting and improving. Sustainable. Funded by something other than pure ego.

Plus A Running Start For The Next Adventure…

For the entrepreneurial developer, there are three really good reasons why you should try to monetize that little side project. Even if there isn’t much commercial potential.

First, it will make you a better developer by encouraging you to maintain / expand a project over a long period of time. Even during a quiet month, I usually wind up tinkering with something that reinforces my understanding of Python or Javascript. It also gives you a token incentive to buckle down and learn the ”hard stuff” in your chosen toolset, using tangible projects and measurable outcomes.

Second, it gives you some exposure to the business side of the web: generating traffic and monetizing it. If you ever do launch a ”real product”, you will need to know this stuff. SEO and social media sounds silly until you realize just how much traffic can come from Google, Reddit, and Twitter. Ad design, targeting, and placement are boring until you need those $5 clicks you are buying from Google to start covering their cost. It is a lot easier to learn this on a small site than after you start a real business – with partners, investors, and customers asking why the server keep crashing and when the next payment is coming.

Finally, you get a running start on your next adventure. The server is paid for. We have a battle tested codebase that can give us a head start on development. Google crawls this site regularly – we can get new content indexed and ranked within a few days and know how to get the first dozen links to a new site (without resorting to spam). My out-of-pocket cost to test something new just got very small…

And that is the big win. When you take the cost of running experiments to near zero, you can explore a lot of ideas. It’s like being locked in a room full of free lottery tickets. It’s up to you to keep scratching…

The post Building Sustainable Websites appeared first on Hanging Hyena.

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…

Naturally, we did a version of the scrabble solver which was customized into a words with friends helper. Same basic design, just optimized some features for that game. Interestingly enough – while I suspect most of our audience is actually playing words with friends, the bulk of our scrabble traffic is on the regular scrabble solver. We actually saw a similar effect on the hangman offering – people tend to use the relatively generic hangman solver rather than our customized hanging with friends cheat.

We did look at a couple of alternatives – the algorithm behind the scrabble helper is actually fairly flexible. One of our early designs actually envisioned a full board solver. From a technical perspective, this would have been fairly straighforward. We would have basically written some loops to generate the additional cells (full board vs. row) and then extended our solver to iterate across the different rows/columns. The biggest challenge, from a usage perspective, is the chore of entering / maintaining every more. We suspected that would turn off about 99% of the audience (based on analysis of a couple of similar sites)…. and thus our simpler approach (which gets a bit more love).

The key is balance – give people just enough assistance that they can win a little more often, while giving them just enough skin in the game that they want to keep playing..

Incidently, we’re open to feedback – if there’s a feature you like / hate / love / need, drop us a line and we’ll take a look at it…

Head Hyena.

The post Scrabble Helpers – Striking The Right Balance appeared first on Hanging Hyena.