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 letter distributions not allowed. Official rules treat the "Q" tile as just one letter, but usually Catalan players use the "Q" tile like the "QU" digraph and all Catalan Scrabble Clubs use this "de facto" rule. "K", "W", and "Y" are absent because they are only used in loanwords or, in the case of "Y", the digraph "NY". Blanks cannot be used to represent "K", "W", or "Y". There is a Catalan Scrabble clone which uses the same 21x21 board as Super Scrabble. Croatian-language Scrabble sets use the following 103 tiles: "Q", "W", "X" and "Y" are not included, as Croatian does