Hi John, long time no hear! I just found out about your project today - wish I'd known back when you were designing it, because I might have been able to help you with one of your TODO items:
> In Landau we precalculated BaSiC leaves for 1-6 tiles, > but that was simply in the interest of speed. That is, > they were based only on 1 tile values and v/c. BobBot > actually had simmed leave values for almost all of the > leaves, and I think that's what we should do too. I > generated 1-4 tile leave values (except for 4 tile leaves > with a blank) with Landau, but I think I know how to do > them better than I did before, and of course it would be > nice to do them with TWL06. So we should If I'd known, I'ld have twisted your arm to include the static evaluation function we discussed on wordgame-programmers a few years ago (do you remember http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/scrabble_solver/analysis.html ?) which includes an accurate way to fully calculate (i.e. not just probabilistically sim) good rackleaves for any number of tiles. Unfortunately being a C programmer and not knowing C++ (or having the time to learn, with quite a few other things competing for my time nowadays) I doubt I'll be adding it myself, which is a shame given that yours is the first game engine with a lookahead evaluator that I've seen whose source is available. If you or anyone else on this group is interested and would like to try adding the algorithm in the paper above to the Quackle chassis, by all means be my guest :-) I'll be here to help on everything except actual C++ coding. So is there a write-up anywhere of the major features of Quackle? Did you implement that 'n-in-the-bag' endgame optimization you were thinking about a few years ago, for example? Or does the endgame in Quackle start when there are no tiles left in the bag? Graham Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/quackle/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
