I modified Quackle and wrote some python scripts to compute estimated equity for each rack of letters i currently don't know (In this email i say "rack" when i mean some non-empty set of letters, not necessarily of length 7). It works as follows:
1) take a list of racks i currently know 2) have Quackle's speedy player play itself for 1 million or more games 3) each time there is a best move that forms at least one word i don't currently know, find the first move that formed words all of which i do know. 4) accumulate the difference in equity (between the best move and the one i could have played) to all the words i didn't know that helped form that best move 5) after 1 million games, sort the list of all racks i don't know by total accumulated equity: it's likely i will get the most reward/time by studying the top racks first. I believe this is different than John O'laughlin's playability lists in several ways: he didn't take into account your current rack knowledge. Every word in his list fights to be better than every other word in the dictionary, not just the ones you already know. And he sorts words, not racks, which had led me not to add DEINORS to my cardbox yet, even though it's pretty important (i always learn all the words in a rack, so i prefer to have a list of important racks to study, not words). Also, I think he only looked at the main word formed in each play, and not all words, which would underestimate the value of a words hookability to some extent. Anyway, it's not a user-friendly implementation by any means, just a hacked quackle build that spits out large .txt files of moves and equity, and a python script to parse those files. If you are brave and interested, you can compute your own lists. The files you need are here: http://www.eugenedeon.com/collect1.zip It's probably not that different from John's lists if you were to combine his values for each word into a list of rack values, but it does look at all words formed in a play, and it does consider your current knowledge (provided you can put most of the words you know into a file). The eugPlayability.exe will crash once in a while (once in every 500,000 games or so - dunno why), but can just ignore it, it should keep going. I also wanted to do a similar analysis to determine in which order to study hooks, but never got to that yet. My Scrabble addiction has gotten way out of hand lately, so I'm gonna back off for a while, enjoy! Eugene
