Good news about endgame handling in the newly-released v0.94 of Quackle. Back in June, I had a game at club where I needed to play very carefully to prevent my opponent from bingo-ing out. I was ahead by 46 points with 3 tiles in the bag and both blanks unseen. The remaining tile pool was 'ABDEGILR??' so I figured she had at least one blank on her rack, and I wanted to be careful to both (a) block the only open bingo lane and (b) not empty the bag. I found a 2-tile play that was just the ticket, made that play for 17 points, and went on to win the game.
When I ran the game thru a previous version of Quackle (v0.92, I think) in post-mortem, the move I had found wasn't even listed as a choice. What it did list as choices were a 36-point play that I had seen and decided against because it emptied the bag and opened an even worse bingo lane, and a 32-point play that left the existing bingo lane open and opened up another bingo lane. I considered both those moves to be likely to lose, added my move to the list, and ran a Sim. The moves of interest were SPOOK 36 and WOP 32, both very dangerous because they empty the bag, and (T)OW off a T, fewer points, but closing the only open bingo lane. The results of that Sim were something like this: SPOOK ~32, (T)OW ~31, and WOP ~30 -- not what I considered a satisfying result. I'm happy to say that v0.94 of Quackle handles this endgame better! For one thing, (T)OW is now listed as a choice by "Generate Moves," and when I run a Sim of ~500 iterations on a list of 6 choices, I get this result: place/word score win %age equity L4 (T)OW 17 75 1.3 10J SPOOK 36 50 -3.9 14B WO 23 39 -34.7 14B WOP 33 27 -19.2 14A SWOP 35 27 -20.5 14A TWO 25 6 -28.2 I'd still like to see the gap between (T)OW and SPOOK wider, and I think WO (not emptying the bag) is better than the 4 bag-emptying plays, but having (T)OW sim best is still a *huge* step in the right direction. Combined with playing almost-bingo opening racks like 'AEINORT' significantly better than before (exch O rather than playing RATION for 12 points), this version of Quackle is MUCH better than the previous version. Nice work, Quackle team! John Hart
