> I hope you'll excuse a possible naive question, but why do you need to > simulate many games to compile these lists? Can't they be determined > statically from the wordlist and the tile frequency/values?
Wow that's an awesome question. It's the same question as "can the value of moves in a certain position be calculated mathematically, instead of using the monte-carlo method to simulate?" It seems like the answer should be "Yes", except that it's probably very complicated. Are any incredibly bored mathematicians up to the task? Roughly speaking, it's so hard or impossible to calculate something like this because tiles frequency doesn't match the likelihood of a tile being on a rack, because rack leaves aren't random. (There are only 4 esses, but it's more likely to be on someone's rack than one of the four U's, because players tend to dump U's more quickly.) Chris Lipe
