Maven (Scrabble) on Scrabble. The problem with Alpha Beta is that some Scrabble endgames require 14 moves to play out, and it is not possible to search that deeply. This is not merely a theoretical possibility. When one player is "stuck" with a tile, then playing out all remaining tiles is impossible. In that situation the optimal strategy for both sides is usually to play one tile on each turn. Maven uses a different approach. The B* search algorithm is a selective-depth, progressive-widening algorithm that guarantees to find optimal solutions to two-player games when one can compute upper and lower bounds on
Duplicate Scrabble Duplicate Scrabble Duplicate Scrabble is a variant of the board game Scrabble where all the players are faced with the same board and letters at the same time and must play the highest scoring word they can find. Although duplicate is rarely played at competition level in English, it is the most popular form of the game in French and is also played in other languages, such as Romanian and Dutch. The largest French Scrabble festivals can attract over 2000 people and some individual tournaments can count over 1000 participants per game. Although not popular for competitions in English, the