Team: 62
School: MELROSE HIGH
Area of Science: game therory and statistics
Interim:
We got scrabble
Definition of the problem:
Our project is to find the highest possible score on the popular word game Scrabble.
We will have the computer playing four players.
One of the players (Bob) will be the best player in the world and he will be playing against three other computer opponents.
The computer opponents will basically be there to help bob get the highest score possible.
The program that we will be using is Microsoft excel version 9.0.
We are doing this in excel because it can track the data in the different fields like we need it to and because we can make a good board from it.
It can also have one letter in each cell like in scrabble and have it spell out the word and then check it in a dictionary
Plan for the computer:
To make the computer work our problem we are going to make it do a series of "loops", with the seven best possible letters that will be drawn out of a pool of letters.
In the real game you cant do this but we are so that we can get the best score possible.
The loops will be the computer checking each letter against all the others to find all combinations of letters possible and see if there are any words in the seven letters.
Once it does that we will make the computer decide which word will score the most possible amount of points
As the placement on the board is a major factor we will make the computer do another series of loops to determine the best possible location for the word.
We will also have three other "players" besides the player getting the highest score (Bob).
They will be helping Bob to get the best possible score by getting the playable tiles close to the double and triple word and letter score tiles.
They will also leave openings for high scoring words and they will not use high scoring letters.
The computer will have to keep track of all the scores, letters used, words used, and how the opponents are playing
Description of progress to date:
At first we started out with a 6X6 sized board, only used 1, 2, and 3 letter words, and only get five letters at a time.
After we do the six by six board we will move on to a 10X10 board, use 1-5 letter words and get six letters per hand.
After we do the 10X10 sized board we will use the normal 15X15 sized board, 1-7 letter words, and get seven letters at a time
We are going in steps like this so we can do the looping better when we get to the normal sized board , rather than just jumping from the 6X6 board to the 15X15 board.
So far we have found a way to do the looping on paper and have started work on the computer and we are about to begin the looping for the board on the computer.
Results expected:
If all goes well we should have a score of at least 878 point.
The score we are trying to get is 1000 points
References:
www.themaninblue.com
Team Members:
james gorley
josh radcliffe
Brian Raulie
stephanie romero
Sponsoring Teacher: Alan Daugherty