Scrabble® [1]Back to Contents Prev: [2]Conclusions Next:
   [3]Introduction
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                                Recommendations
                                       
   With the basic infrastructure available, further work in this domain
   should focus on improving move generation speed and game strategy.
   
Improving Move Generation Speed

   [4]Gordon analyzes a variant of the DAWG that takes substantially more
   space, but improves move generation speed by a factor of 2. [5]Appel
   and Jacobson suggest investigation into the possibility of increasing
   the amount of pruning that their generation algorithm can perform via
   an additional data structure that maintains a list of possible word
   prefixes.
   
Game Strategy

   The move selection heuristics and end-game engine utilizing opponent
   search mentioned in the [6]Move Selection section are good candidates
   for analysis and implementation.
   
   An interesting approach to consider for developing a rack leave
   heuristic weighting function is to analyze the lexicon for letter
   patterns that occur with high frequency and/or contribute to
   high-scoring words, and the assign such patterns higher weight. Such
   an analysis would probably best be implemented using some efficient
   hashing structures and would benefit from fast string comparison
   routines.
   
   A larger lexicon would obviously improve game performance. Building
   such a lexicon is currently work in progress.
   
   More extensive logging support (beyond the current rudimentary
   logging) from the game server would facilitate analysis of computer
   player behaviour.
   
   From the standpoint of improving the "realism" of the program,
   investigating ways to set the strength level of the program in a
   "natural" manner might prove illuminating.
   
   While opponent search appears infeasible on a single machine, it may
   be more realistic in a distributed environment. It might be worth
   implementing a distributed network of slave processes that simply
   accept a game state and compute branches of the game tree, then doing
   a local evaluation and sending the results back to the main controller
   game server.
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   [7]Back to Contents Prev: [8]Conclusions Next: [9]Introduction

References

   1. http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~k2tam/Scrabble/contents.html
   2. http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~k2tam/Scrabble/conclude.html
   3. http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~k2tam/Scrabble/intro.html
   4. http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~k2tam/Scrabble/refs.html#Gordon1
   5. http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~k2tam/Scrabble/refs.html#Appel
   6. http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~k2tam/Scrabble/movesel.html
   7. http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~k2tam/Scrabble/contents.html
   8. http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~k2tam/Scrabble/conclude.html
   9. http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~k2tam/Scrabble/intro.html