I don't understand your analogy. The Scrabble problem is people not knowing the words they use. The only Chess equivalent could be people not knowing or understanding the moves they make. It has nothing to do with someone moving a queen and not being a queen themselves.

Scrabble is not about words,anymore than monopoly is about business.

Scrabble is arranging a random selection of tiles into combinations in such a way that score is maximized.

The tiles could have hexadecimal numbers on them and could be played against a randomly generated dictionary of scored combinations. Much like you can play chess with dragons figurines instead of castles or storm troopers instead pawns.

It was as much to do with words as chess has to do with war in the middle ages.

> The tiles could have hexadecimal numbers on them and could be played against a randomly generated dictionary of scored combinations.

This is an intriguing assertion. The words of a natural language are far from randomly generated. While I can invent new words like 'wobblery' or 'fandogonkified' they still follow patterns familiar from other words.

If I understand the Chomsky idea correctly, we are born with structures in our brain ready to accept a new language. A human might have a hard time memorizing a dictionary of randomly generated words in hexidecimal -- he or she would have to resort to mnemonic techniques (peg lists, memory palace, etc) to memorize that dictionary but it could be done. Further, it could be done by any human who was dedicated to the task.

Whereas the system you describe involves brute force, much like the Deep Blue approach to winning chess. And it's been shown that a group of people collaborating together can defeat computers at chess! I think a lot of interesting research could be done here (if it hasn't already) and it would not surprise me if your assertion could be proven wrong (but I generally agree with it).

The system GP describes doesn't involve brute force, it's just an accurate description of Scrabble. It's about arranging tiles with point values in a way score is maximized. That the scoring positions are not uniformly random but follow some implicit language rules is something that helps people memorize / derive the proper arrangements, but otherwise does not impact the game in any way.

What is the difference between memorizing a sequence of steps and having a couple of sequences of steps culturally contextualized in a symbolic language?

I mean it's literally one language against another one. You can call it 'meaning' all you like, but 'meaning' is representative. You call it 'understand' but to this guy memorizing the entire dictionary in order might mean 'understand'.

You might say you need to have felt 'being angry' in order to know what 'angry means' and to determine this as understanding the meaning of the word is ridiculous because it goes both ways. People make their owns meanings up, the only reason we agree is because we exist in relatively the same space time (with respect to the size and age of the universe) and information only varies so much at the distributed rate it tends to vary across minds, people most people are similar in how their minds function and construct pattern relations.

Exactly. The player moved the Bishop diagonally, but unless they understand why they moved the Bishop that way, it feels like they're cheating.

Honestly, some Chess players don't even make the horsey noise when they move the knights.

I could have sworn that it was a requirement to be able to define any word placed, but maybe that's just a house rule I internalised while growing up. Or a rule since dropped from the 1960s edition we played with.

It's a common way of avoiding/reducing the need to consult a dictionary.

It's easy to come up with a perfectly cromulent definition for a made up word.

...and thus embiggen the dictionary itself.

But sometimes not so easy when you're put on the spot.

Please define "cromulent"

Cromulent, adj. legitimate, valid.

The funny thing is that it probably has the potential to become so well known that people forget its roots, and then people wouldn't get the original joke in that Simpsons episode anymore.

Reality has a tendency to make works harder to understand out of context... My favourite "I-feel-old" case of words that have changed meaning is this:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." (William Gibson, Neuromancer)

So, bright blue then... Changes the image quite a bit.

Learning the word + the meaning just grows the size of the set you need to memorise.

But actually that'd be a fun variant.

A spelling bee where you choose the word based on the constraints of scrabble.

Surely it would be incredibly subjective to require a definition?

Whereas in Scrabble as it stands, a move is either legal or illegal. It's very black and white. Well, once you decide on the dictionary you're playing to!

I stopped playing Scrabble against my father because he was frustrated that I had memorised every two and three letter word. Even being able to define many didn't matter; if they came across as though they were memorised rather than learnt, he was annoyed. I don't see the issue. Everyone who plays is playing by the same rules.

A common thing is to give all players a list of all of the weird little 2 and 3 letter words. The problem with them is not that they're illegal, just that knowing them is very gamey unfun busywork, but gives a big advantage to everybody who spent time memorizing them.

Try it with your dad.

example: http://www.scrabblepages.com/scrabble/words/

Another solution is to ban two-letter words altogether.

Wouldn't that significantly cut down on the valid moves possible from a given board configuration? You'd only be able to play perpendicular to preexisting words.

You could also pre- or post-fix.

I imagine that the parent considered that one could play a longer word that happened to make shorter words just not _only_ play a two letter word; so parallel words would be acceptable as would things like in-fills that only took one letter but caused 2 words to be formed.

Perhaps a better, succinct, rule that tackles the same problem would be "a minimum of two tiles must be placed".

You're right, I didn't think of that - but if you're playing with someone who doesn't know too many two-letter-words, that might come up less frequently anyway.

Having played a lot of Scrabble with my wife I can feel for your father a bit. I think its probably less about having memorised them, and more about two players of dramatically different skill levels playing the same game.

Eventually I came to terms with it and just considered anything within a two hundred points or so of my wife's score as a personal win, but it can still be frustrating to feel you're playing your best and losing to someone who's barely trying.

The moral of this story I think is not to play an English graduate at Scrabble unless you're OK with losing.

My wife and I are fairly evenly matched but one thing we do is combine our scores at the end and compare the total to past games.

And it makes the training less pointless. Words without meaning are useful for nothing besides winning Scrabble, knowing strange words WITH meaning however has a chance to be useful outside the game.

I'm fairly certain challenging words we couldn't confidently define and use in a sentence is one of the learning methods my parents employed.

That's a great way to force you to think about the words you choose to use.