On 5/14/07, John O'Laughlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Eileen, We haven't done any work yet on Quackle for Palm or Palm Pilot. It might not be extremely easy, but one possibility is to just integrate Quackle's strategy into xwords, an existing open source program. I don't know when or if I'll have time to do anything with that.
It's very unlikely to be easy. xwords is highly tweaked for a compact data structure and the data structure is fairly central to the program as far as I remember. Unless Quackle could easily pull out its own dawg by the teeth and substitute Eric's more compressed format, I doubt it would be a happy marriage. Palms are not big devices, in any sense. What might be more productive could be to produce a web-based port of Quackle, and access it via a wireless-enabled palm or a cellphone. The basic strategy to webify an existing scrabble game is to make the game stateless, and pass in all the state on each move and store the updated state that's returned to you after each move, invoking the program to do a single move on each submission. It is easiest if the program does no HTML I/O - merely reads a file with the game state, and writes a file with the updated game state, allowing you to wrap the play in whatever interface you prefer. Note that *everything relevant* must be in the file, such as the history of moves, any inferences you have made as to your opponents rack, etc etc - i.e. not just the board shape and whose play it is. Probably best to let the middleware do the bag management too. You could probably reuse the formats proposed for machine to machine play, and just make the human interaction look like another machine. G
