If you're into studying hooks lately, you might find this useful: I took the idea of playability and tried computing the relative imporance of all the words with respect to needing to know and find the hooks of that word to make the best play possible. This list is based on (only) 2 million games of quackle speedy self-play. No surprise the 2s win out. No matter what letter is hooked, the word accumulates equity difference, so the more hooks a word has, the higher it tends to be in the list.
And the winner is..... WE! http://www.eugenedeon.com/OWL2_hookability_jan_2009.txt exact details: -let A be the set of all words hooked in the best play -if A is nonempty, find the first subtoptimal play which hooked the set of words B such that A - B is non empty -accumulate the equity difference of the two plays to each word in A - B example: quackle's top 3 moves are: 1) DARK, (HINGE)R, A(TONE) 30.2109 2) ARK, (HINGE)R, A(TONE) 27.789 3) KA(N)TAR, A(TONE) 24.9023 the best played used an R hook on HINGE, and an A hook on TONE. So did the next play, so skip it. the 3rd best play didn't hook anything on HINGE, so accumulate 30.2109 - 24.9023 to HINGE. A(TONE) was still made on the 3rd play, so don't accumulate points to it. This is obviously an arbitrary choice, and I don't claim for it to be correct (or for any of the data to be accurate). I'll keep running it for a while. Maybe until 30 million games or so. Then the middle section should be more accurate. The top is fairly stable. Eugene d'Eon
