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 no premium squares (originally 64 tiles on an 8×8 board). It has a Qu tile instead of Q and a different tile distribution than Scrabble. Words can be formed as in Scrabble as well as by playing on top of previously formed words. When playing over a word, at least one tile from the original word must be incorporated into the new word. All tiles, with the exception of the Qu tile in certain circumstances, are worth the same, with additional points scored for higher stacks of letters. Stacks can't go higher than five tiles and all words that are