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
Scrabble variants points and are coloured according to their value. Double and triple word squares function in the same manner as standard Scrabble. However, the coloured triple letter squares are only active when the tile colour matches that of the square. Literaxx is available at PlayOK. Anadrome is a web-based variant which (as the name implies) allows words to be played reading in any orthogonal direction, doubling traditional turn opportunities. With 39 different bonus tiles, many directly correlating to mathematical operators like * (multiplication), ^ (exponentiation), ! (factorial), ⌈ (ceiling and floor), and Π (product series) across over 500 boards, scores may