{"id":177,"date":"2007-01-28T21:37:52","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T01:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/archives\/177"},"modified":"2011-01-23T01:23:31","modified_gmt":"2011-01-23T05:23:31","slug":"humans-51749484784784-v-computers-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/2007\/01\/28\/humans-51749484784784-v-computers-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Humans 51,749,484,784,784 v. Computers 4"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Computer Program Wins Its First Scrabble Tournament<\/a> <\/p>\n

\n

When Deep Blue first defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the computer program’s victory was hailed as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, and rightfully so. But in November, another program reached a gaming milestone of its own, and no one seemed to notice. The Wired Campus intends to fix that.<\/p>\n

At a Scrabble tournament in Toronto, a piece of software called Quackle triumphed in a best-of-five series over David Boys, a computer programmer who won the world Scrabble championship in 1995. The open-source program’s chief designers include Jason Katz-Brown, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also happens to be one of the top-ranked Scrabble players in the world.<\/p>\n

Quackle’s win did not come easily. Mr. Boys leapt out to a quick lead against the software, winning the first two games thanks to words like “pithead” and “redyeing.” But the computer program roared back and took the final three tilts, making a couple of outstanding plays — like “deviating,” placed through two disconnected I’s that were already on the board — that even top-level human players would be hard-pressed to spot.<\/p>\n

Quackle earned the right to play Mr. Boys by edging out another Scrabble-playing program, Maven, in a series of games against expert human players. (Quackle finished the Toronto Computer vs. Human Showdown, as the event was called, with a gaudy 32-4 record, while Maven could only muster a 30-6 showing.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Boys seemed to have no trouble keeping a sense of perspective after the loss: “It’s still better to be a human than to be a computer,” he said. And as the former world champion undoubtedly realizes, luck plays a much greater role in a Scrabble duel than in a chess match. About a decade ago, Mr. Boys played a perfect game<\/a> against a more primitive computer program — and he still lost. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: A Computer Program Wins Its First Scrabble Tournament When Deep Blue first defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, the computer program’s victory was hailed as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence, and rightfully so. But in November, another program reached a gaming milestone of its own, and no one seemed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[587,3027,167,3051,315,277,68,170,176,433,283,995],"class_list":["post-177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","tag-chronicle","tag-computers","tag-design","tag-fun","tag-intelligence","tag-name","tag-role","tag-software","tag-technology","tag-thanks","tag-user-interface","tag-vehicle"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1rUBW-2R","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ezrasf.com\/wplog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}