--- In [email protected], "John O'Laughlin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On 12/13/06, Hubert Wee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > In a replayed game against an opponent, opp was 90 pts > > down with a playable ENAMELEd(60), 5 in the bag. > > However the play does not appear on Quackle's > > kibitzer, this is rather queer. > > I am not shocked that a low scoring, blank burning, bag emptying, game > losing bingo was foregone, but it would depend very much on the > situation. > > John O'Laughlin
Seems like a good opportunity for Quackle to go beyond just making the right play and actually TEACH the user WHY certain plays were considered or discarded. Let's assume that the 5 tiles left in the bag cannot be any combination of letters that produce 64-point QI or ZA plays, or other high-scoring prospects. Then, the 60-point bingo would almost certainly lose the game (still trailing by 30, no way to catch up). An expert player knows that cultivating the rack with an eye toward bingo-ing OUT is the only way to win; Quackle should understand that, too. It would be nice to have an option (maybe a checkbox) to always include the highest-scoring play, even if it's not a candidate that Generate Choices would select. Thinking back to Maven, there was a 'Compare Moves' feature that offered an opinion (sometimes useful, sometimes not) on how one move stacked up against another. Not that Maven was perfect; the very first time I ever saw it, it failed spectacularly to find a winning move at the end of a game. More on that in a footnote. For Quackle in the here-and-now, including the highest- scoring play, even when it doesn't meet the criteria for a "best" play, could be very instructive, especially when doing post-mortem. If the game-losing 60-point bingo is included in the Choices list, and ends up dead last in the Sim, with a win %-age of 0, sobeit. John Hart When Maven failed to find a winning endgame play: Circa 1994, a friend bought Mac-Maven and we used it to do a post-mortem on a game we played. We wrote down all our racks, recorded all moves played, and set about reviewing the game. I was behind by about 25 points with X, blank, and 5 vowels on my rack; opp had just emptied the bag. All the vowels were of the A-E-O type; no I or U. There was a place to play either Xi or Xu (X on TLS) for 50, winning the game, which was exactly what I had done. Maven listed a slew of 17- and 18-point plays, all of which were AX, EX, or OX, all keeping the blank on the rack. All of those plays would have lost, because my opponent was going to go out on her next turn. I still remember being shocked that an easy 50-point play like Xi was not listed. "Isn't there a way to tell it to list the highest-scoring play?" I asked. There was not. No way to override the program's opinion about rack leave, etc. That was a serious flaw, which I assume has been fixed in the intervening years (someone who saw Maven play in Toronto, please fill me in).
