|
Maven (Scrabble)
Maven is an artificial intelligence Scrabble player, created by Brian Sheppard. It has been used in official licensed Hasbro Scrabble games. Algorithms Game phases Maven's gameplay is sub-divided into three phases: The "mid-game" phase, the "pre-endgame" phase, and the "endgame" phase. The "mid-game" phase lasts from the beginning of the game up until there are nine or fewer tiles left in the bag. The program uses a rapid algorithm to find all possible plays from the given rack, and then part of the program called the "kibitzer" uses simple heuristics to sort them into rough order of quality. The most promising moves are then evaluated by "simming", in which the program simulates the random drawing of tiles, plays forward a set number of plays, and compares the points spread of the moves' outcomes. By simulating thousands of random drawings, the program can give a very accurate quantitative evaluation of the different plays. (While a Monte Carlo search, Maven does not use Mon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' of Oxford University Press defines artificial intelligence as: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. AI applications include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon and Netflix), understanding human speech (such as Siri and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Tesla), automated decision-making and competing at the highest level in strategic game systems (such as chess and Go). ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scrabble
''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon. The name ''Scrabble'' is a trademark of Mattel in most of the world, except in the United States and Canada, where it is a trademark of Hasbro, under the brands of both of its subsidiaries, Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers. The game is sold in 121 countries and is available in more than 30 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide, and roughly one-third of American and half of British homes have a ''Scrabble'' set. There are approximately 4,000 ''Scrabble'' clubs around the world. Game details The game is played by two to four players on a square game board imprinted with a 15×15 grid of cells (individually known as " ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hasbro
Hasbro, Inc. (; a syllabic abbreviation of its original name, Hassenfeld Brothers) is an American multinational conglomerate holding company incorporated and headquartered in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Hasbro owns the trademarks and products of Kenner, Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, and Wizards of the Coast, among others. As of August 2020 over 81.5% of its shares were held by large financial institutions. Among its products are ''Transformers'', ''G.I. Joe'', ''Power Rangers'', '' Rom the Space Knight'', ''Micronauts'', ''M.A.S.K.'', ''Monopoly'', ''Furby'', ''Nerf'', ''Twister'', and '' My Little Pony'', and with the Entertainment One acquisition in 2019, franchises like Peppa Pig and PJ Masks. The Hasbro brand also spawned TV shows to promote its products, such as '' Family Game Night'' on the Discovery Family network, a joint venture with Warner Bros. Discovery. History Hassenfeld Brothers Three Polish-Jewish brothers, Herman, Hillel, and Henry Hassenfeld, founded Hass ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monte Carlo Tree Search
In computer science, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a heuristic search algorithm for some kinds of decision processes, most notably those employed in software that plays board games. In that context MCTS is used to solve the game tree. MCTS was combined with neural networks in 2016 and has been used in multiple board games like Chess, Shogi, Checkers, Backgammon, Contract Bridge, Computer Go, Scrabble, and Clobber as well as in turn-based-strategy video games (such as Total War: Rome II's implementation in the high level campaign AI). History Monte Carlo method The Monte Carlo method, which uses random sampling for deterministic problems which are difficult or impossible to solve using other approaches, dates back to the 1940s. In his 1987 PhD thesis, Bruce Abramson combined minimax search with an ''expected-outcome model'' based on random game playouts to the end, instead of the usual static evaluation function. Abramson said the expected-outcome model "is shown to b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine learning paradigms, alongside supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Reinforcement learning differs from supervised learning in not needing labelled input/output pairs to be presented, and in not needing sub-optimal actions to be explicitly corrected. Instead the focus is on finding a balance between exploration (of uncharted territory) and exploitation (of current knowledge). The environment is typically stated in the form of a Markov decision process (MDP), because many reinforcement learning algorithms for this context use dynamic programming techniques. The main difference between the classical dynamic programming methods and reinforcement learning algorithms is that the latter do not assume knowledge of an exact mathematica ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Variance
In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expectation of the squared deviation of a random variable from its population mean or sample mean. Variance is a measure of dispersion, meaning it is a measure of how far a set of numbers is spread out from their average value. Variance has a central role in statistics, where some ideas that use it include descriptive statistics, statistical inference, hypothesis testing, goodness of fit, and Monte Carlo sampling. Variance is an important tool in the sciences, where statistical analysis of data is common. The variance is the square of the standard deviation, the second central moment of a distribution, and the covariance of the random variable with itself, and it is often represented by \sigma^2, s^2, \operatorname(X), V(X), or \mathbb(X). An advantage of variance as a measure of dispersion is that it is more amenable to algebraic manipulation than other measures of dispersion such as the expected absolute deviation; for e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Go (game)
Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. A 2016 survey by the International Go Federation's 75 member nations found that there are over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go and over 20 million current players, the majority of whom live in East Asia. The playing pieces are called stones. One player uses the white stones and the other, black. The players take turns placing the stones on the vacant intersections (''points'') of a board. Once placed on the board, stones may not be moved, but stones are removed from the board if the stone (or group of stones) is surrounded by opposing stones on all orthogonally adjacent points, in which case the stone or group is ''captured''. The game proceeds until neither player wishes to make another move. Wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
B-star Search Algorithm
In computer science, B* (pronounced "B star") is a best-first graph search algorithm that finds the least-cost path from a given initial node to any goal node (out of one or more possible goals). First published by Hans Berliner in 1979, it is related to the A* search algorithm. Summary The algorithm stores intervals for nodes of the tree as opposed to single point-valued estimates. Then, leaf nodes of the tree can be searched until one of the top level nodes has an interval which is clearly "best." Details Interval evaluations rather than estimates Leaf nodes of a B*-tree are given evaluations that are intervals rather than single numbers. The interval is supposed to contain the true value of that node. If all intervals attached to leaf nodes satisfy this property, then B* will identify an optimal path to the goal state. Backup process To back up the intervals within the tree, a parent's upper bound is set to the maximum of the upper bounds of the children. A parent's low ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Suffix Automaton
In computer science, a suffix automaton is an efficient data structure for representing the substring index of a given string which allows the storage, processing, and retrieval of compressed information about all its substrings. The suffix automaton of a string S is the smallest directed acyclic graph with a dedicated initial vertex and a set of "final" vertices, such that paths from the initial vertex to final vertices represent the suffixes of the string. In terms of automata theory, a suffix automaton is the minimal partial deterministic finite automaton that recognizes the set of suffixes of a given string S=s_1 s_2 \dots s_n. The state graph of a suffix automaton is called a directed acyclic word graph (DAWG), a term that is also sometimes used for any deterministic acyclic finite state automaton. Suffix automata were introduced in 1983 by a group of scientists from the University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder. They suggested a linear time online algo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
GADDAG
A GADDAG is a data structure presented by Steven Gordon in 1994, for use in generating moves for Scrabble and other word-generation games where such moves require words that "hook into" existing words. It is often in contrast to move-generation algorithms using a directed acyclic word graph (DAWG) such as the one used by Maven. It is generally twice as fast as the traditional DAWG algorithms, but take about 5 times as much space for regulation Scrabble dictionaries. Quackle, an open-source Scrabble program, uses a GADDAG to generate moves. Description The name GADDAG comes from DAG for directed acyclic graph, prefixed by its own reverse. A GADDAG is a specialization of a Trie, containing states and branches to other GADDAGs. It is distinct for its storage of every reversed prefix of every word in a dictionary. This means every word has as many representations as it does letters; since the average word in most Scrabble regulation dictionaries is 5 letters long, this makes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Temporal Difference Learning
Temporal difference (TD) learning refers to a class of model-free reinforcement learning methods which learn by bootstrapping from the current estimate of the value function. These methods sample from the environment, like Monte Carlo methods, and perform updates based on current estimates, like dynamic programming methods. While Monte Carlo methods only adjust their estimates once the final outcome is known, TD methods adjust predictions to match later, more accurate, predictions about the future before the final outcome is known. (A revised version is available oRichard Sutton's publication page) This is a form of bootstrapping, as illustrated with the following example: :"Suppose you wish to predict the weather for Saturday, and you have some model that predicts Saturday's weather, given the weather of each day in the week. In the standard case, you would wait until Saturday and then adjust all your models. However, when it is, for example, Friday, you should have a pretty go ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
