[HN Gopher] Scrabble star wins Spanish world title despite not s...
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Scrabble star wins Spanish world title despite not speaking Spanish
Author : n1b0m
Score : 152 points
Date : 2024-12-10 15:21 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| Suppafly wrote:
| I believe the same thing happened with the French Scrabble
| tournament. You don't need to speak the language, just be really
| good at memorizing lists of words.
| n1b0m wrote:
| Yes he also won the French one after memorising the dictionary
| in nine weeks!
| latentsea wrote:
| How exactly does one memorize an essentially random list of
| approximately 40,000 strings such that they could pull any of
| those strings out a hat at will in just 9 weeks?
|
| What kind of sorcery would even make that possible?
| nkrisc wrote:
| Some just have different brains. I think most people could
| not do that no matter how hard they tried, but with
| billions of people some just can.
| Onavo wrote:
| It's not as hard as you think, he's an English speaker
| and French and English shares approximately 40% of the
| vocabulary. And once you have mastered French, you have
| the other 80% needed for Spanish as it's a Latin language
| like French.
| recursive wrote:
| How hard do you think I think it is? Are you implying
| that it's easy for an English speaker to master the
| English scrabble word list?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Well, I think it is impossible, so the comment works for
| me.
|
| And I refuse to update my priors to account for the fact
| that somebody did it. Because I can't even memorize the
| English scrabble dictionary well enough to enjoy playing.
| I am happier to live in a universe in which Scrabble is
| just impossible.
| latentsea wrote:
| For the stated time frame, it's definitely as hard as you
| think, and then much, much, much harder.
| lupire wrote:
| Most of the points are in bonuses and bongos, so you don't
| have to care much about the short words with common
| letters.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| In fact, maybe it's better not to think of them!
| vunderba wrote:
| In fact, you _do need_ to care about the short words.
|
| 1. they can be useful at locking down the board
|
| 2. knowing all of the words is necessary to be able to
| challenge when somebody attempt to play a phony, which,
| as a native Spanish speaker, you might be even more
| inclined to try against a non-native speaker.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Do professional scrabble players use fake words as a
| strategy? I assumed that (minus the weirdo savant playing
| in a foreign language), everyone at the professional
| level has an extensive vocabulary for which it would be
| difficult to bluff.
| vunderba wrote:
| It's not super common but if I was playing against
| somebody who didn't speak the lingua franca I'd probably
| throw out a couple phonies to test the waters.
|
| The CSW is the official English word list used
| internationally (outside of the US/Thailand/Canada
| because we just HAD to be different) and contains over a
| quarter of a million words. Unless you're at the UPPER OF
| UPPER ECHELONS, there's a chance a crafty player could
| slip a phony in by hooking an "S" on the board or some
| other subtle stem - especially with the pressure of time
| controls.
| numeri wrote:
| There was at least one case of someone trying this
| against Nigel in French, and he got them.
| borski wrote:
| Nigel would catch it.
| numeri wrote:
| Yes, from what I understand - and they also make
| mistakes.
| michaelt wrote:
| Scrabble players at world champion level operate at the
| very edge of what is or isn't a word.
|
| Everyone knows words like "fork", "vogue" and "alligator"
| but only scrabble players know whether or not "forkier",
| "defork", "voguier", "voguiest", "alligatored" and
| "alligate" are real words.
| jjayj wrote:
| Will Anderson, another Scrabble champion/grandmaster,
| uploaded a video talking about Nigel's win here. The win
| is a lot more impressive than memorizing bingoes -
| Spanish scrabble has different letter distributions and
| point values, resulting in different metas. He didn't
| just memorize the Spanish Scrabble dictionary - he
| learned how to play Spanish Scrabble and dominated the
| first Spanish tournament he participated in.
|
| Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in Scrabble
| at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RvNxkQ6Bgs
| BurningFrog wrote:
| You do need to know all 2 and 3 letter words. After that
| you cherry pick.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| The strings are neither random nor independent. There are
| many English cognates, groups of related words, patterns of
| word formation, etc.
|
| It's still an insane feat, since it typically takes actual
| language learners years to get anywhere close to a native
| speaker's inventory of 10,000+ words.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| Depends which language learners. There are people who can
| learn 50 new words a day for months, but those people are
| rare and there feats are probably not replicable for most
| of us.
|
| https://isaak.net/mandarin/ is an example
|
| edit: Isaak is great, but it was 22 words per day not 50
| latentsea wrote:
| My pace is typically 35 words a day when learning
| languages and most people think that's insane. It's still
| only around 1000 a month, which is why I chose that
| number. That's on the order of 12k a year if you don't
| miss a single day, which you usually do.
|
| The claim here is memorizing a full dictionary in 9
| weeks. That has to be at least 40,000 words in 63 days.
| 634 words per day. And then or forgetting it.
|
| It's beyond rare. Its alien.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Have you learnt many languages? I wish I had the energy
| to wanna do it.
|
| In school 35 words a day would be really pushing it for
| me. It had a really hard time learning English words. I
| had to study like an hour for 20 words to pass the test.
| But I learned grammar really fast.
| latentsea wrote:
| Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Fluent in Japanese, can
| watch kdrama and mostly follow along and have basic
| conversations in Korean, forgot virtually all the Chinese
| I did but I managed to pass HSK2 after 2 months of study
| and then HSK3 the following month. I was only in China
| for 3 months on a work trip, so I thought I'd have some
| fun.
| upmind wrote:
| What do you use to learn different languages? Firstly,
| where you get your vocabulary from but also pronunciation
| and grammar?
| latentsea wrote:
| Anki, Netflix, Preply and social clubs.
|
| I start by front loading all the grammar study up to
| upper-intermediate level as fast as possible. Usually a
| premade Anki deck of a few thousand sentences will be
| available for this.
|
| Vocab I pick up from native media. I just read or watch
| whatever I'm interested in, lookup words as I go and put
| them into Anki. I do full immersion and it works well as
| access to entertainment in my target languages is a key
| goal.
|
| Pronunciation I pick up through a crap tonne of exposure
| to native media.
|
| Conversation is through a combination of private tutoring
| and finding people who speak my target languages to hang
| out with.
| michaelt wrote:
| Many players do indeed memorise groups of related words
| and patterns of word formation.
|
| But Nigel Richards? He's on another level:
| https://youtu.be/35rqRFXPWJo?t=143 knowing even
| exceptions to patterns and differences between
| dictionaries, for 9-letter words, in a game where players
| only have 7 letter-tiles.
| BarryMilo wrote:
| I guess he really is a world champion!
| brookst wrote:
| "Patterns" is the key there. Knowing that *OOD has 6ish
| options is more useful than memorizing each word.
| latentsea wrote:
| Native speakers have an inventory on the order of 30,000
| ~ 40,000 words, and it takes them 30 years for their
| vocab to reach its peak. I had an Anki deck I built up
| over a 2 year period containing 17.5k vocab for Japanese
| and I would still frequently encounter words I didn't
| know.
|
| If you don't actually know the meanings of the words,
| they may as well be random. What do you have to remember
| them by if you have no meaning to attach to them?
|
| It's not even an insane feat. It's inhuman.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Inhuman might be going too far since it would imply Nigel
| Richards isn't human. <End pedantic rant>
|
| Also if one takes character patterns (which words are)
| and attach other characteristics, such as number of
| occurrences of individual characters or use ascii
| numbering to convert to numbers, then these character
| patterns (aka words) might be simpler to memorise.
|
| Meaning is only necessary if you intend to speak the
| language.
| latentsea wrote:
| Well he sure ain't a regular human.
|
| If you're applying mnemonics to remember things then the
| act of doing so also takes time and energy. The issue
| here is the volume of information in the stated time
| span.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| It's certainly an amazing feat and it demonstrates what
| humans can actually do if they set their minds to it.
|
| Just a pity that there are so many regular humans.
| latentsea wrote:
| I don't think it really demonstrates what humans can do
| if they can put their mind to it. I think it demonstrates
| what a 1 in 8 billion type edge case looks like.
| brookst wrote:
| Yeah, likely an outlier for hardware acceleration, just
| like some people are insanely good at reconizing faces
| they saw once 20 years ago. That's not cognitive load,
| that's specialized parts of the brain performing far
| better than most people.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| A world where human intelligence made such rapid process
| as CPUs. Stuff of science fiction.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Imagine if that's the norm though. I doubt very much we
| would be wondering how to get to Mars.
|
| Also Nigel Richards probably doesn't spend much time
| watching Netflix or shopping on Amazon. Probably very
| much focussed on scrambling.
|
| A world where one in eight billion binge watches Netflix
| would truly be an interesting world!
| latentsea wrote:
| Apparently he doesn't own a computer. Imagine a world
| where none of us owned computers!
| vunderba wrote:
| The "sorcery" you're looking for is the correct genetic
| sequences that leads to an eidetic memory. No amount of
| compensation using mnemonic devices and memory palaces will
| get you even close to what Nigel Richards is capable of.
| thrance wrote:
| Genetic, or epigenetic!
| tshaddox wrote:
| Eh, I bet he's using some normal Latin vocabulary and
| orthography skills too. I suspect he wouldn't do quite at
| well memorizing a truly random set of combinations of 26
| symbols.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Right it's not random that it was French, and not, say,
| Russian.
| dmurray wrote:
| You say that, but there are some world-class Scrabble
| players from Thailand who play Scrabble in English, a
| language with a completely different alphabet and
| orthography from their native tongue. They don't
| necessarily speak English well, either. One beat Nigel
| Richards for the World Championship in 2009 [0].
|
| I think it would take Richards about 20 minutes to learn
| the Cyrillic alphabet and a few weeks to get familiar
| enough with the patterns of Russian to be a competitive
| player in that language. World champion is obviously a
| harder ask, but I wouldn't rule it out.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakorn_Nemitrmansuk
| borski wrote:
| Sounds like his next challenge.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Apparently his mother said, about teaching him Scrabble:
|
| "When he learnt to talk he wasn't interested in words, just
| numbers. I said: I know a game you're not going to be very
| good at because you can't spell very well and you weren't
| good at English at school."
|
| I guess the sorcery you are looking for is spite.
| username135 wrote:
| amen to that
| liquidise wrote:
| > the sorcery you are looking for is spite.
|
| Both philosophical and poetic. True brilliance.
| stevage wrote:
| Scrabble really is a maths game. It just looks like a
| word game.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Right. It's not a word game, it's an area-control game
| with 150,000 rules for legal placement of your resources.
|
| Codenames is a word game. Scrabble is about arbitrary
| sequences of glyphs.
| stevage wrote:
| Interestingly there are versions with more restricted
| tilesets and hence fever words to learn. Like one that
| only uses the letters of BOGGLE.
| vunderba wrote:
| Where did you pull that number from? The ODS which is the
| official French Scrabble dictionary has something like
| 300,000 words.
|
| In 9 weeks that's averaging memorizing several THOUSAND
| words PER DAY.
|
| And don't give me BULL like "well plurality S/ES means a
| lot less" - yeah. NO. He still has to remember which words
| take _what_ kind of plurality. And if you watch _ANY_
| interviews with him, you can tell he doesn 't really take
| any shortcuts - he just straight-up memorizes them as a
| series of playable "tokens".
|
| I'm all for the _" indomitable human spirit"_ but you could
| practice 24/7 and you'd still be _SCRABBLING_ at base camp
| while Nigel Richards summitted Everest without the aid of
| supplemental oxygen.
|
| https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8
| wongarsu wrote:
| Scrolled to a random position in the file, and there's 37
| lines of all declinations of the word "monologue".
| Followed by a bunch of nouns with just two to four forms,
| followed by 47 declinations of the word "monopolise".
|
| What he did is no small feat. You still have to memorize
| which suffixes are possible in which verbs (there are
| rules he would pick up on, but there are exceptions to
| the rules). But it is made easier by French verbs having
| a lot of possible suffixes, those suffixes being fairly
| regular, and English taking a lot of its "fancy" words
| with French (or adopting a Latin version that's close to
| what French adopted from Latin).
|
| I still couldn't come close to thinking about achieving
| it. He is doing the extreme sport version of scrabble for
| sure.
|
| And these advantages in French make it even more
| impressive that he could do the same even in Spanish.
| Asraelite wrote:
| I actually don't think the exceptions are much of a
| problem overall. Most irregularities in a language happen
| with the most common words. Once you go from learning the
| most common words to simply learning _all_ the words, the
| relative frequency of irregular formations that you
| encounter would go down dramatically.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 98% of those words are useless for competitive Scrabble.
| zem wrote:
| he knows them anyway
| darepublic wrote:
| You could cheat with computer too
| numeri wrote:
| Nigel Richards usually outperforms (and is orders of
| magnitude faster than, at least for the complicated
| endgames, if I understand correctly) the best computer
| Scrabble programs.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| While knowing every possible word is very helpful in
| scrabble, the most useful, important words for the game
| will be very different than the words that are useful for
| speaking the language well. There's many words out there
| that are going to be almost unusable, as they are low
| value. So you aren't really going to need all the words,
| but you want to memorize basically every word that uses the
| high scoring tiles, and understand how wide the 'gaps' you
| are leading when you leave high value letters on the board,
| especially near high scoring, whole word tiles.
|
| So you arent' overestimating how long it takes to memorize
| words, but how useful having a good, normal vocabulary in
| the language actually is for being good at scrabble. Go
| look at guides for English scrabble, and see the words you
| are trying to memorize.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It would be interesting to determine how few words a
| Scrabble program needs to know to be a world class
| player!
| brookst wrote:
| It will be probabilistic, because of the randomness of
| the draw. More words = greater chance of high scoring
| words for this board and draw. It likely wouldn't take
| many words at all to beat a workd class player 1% of the
| time, and a pretty substantial vocabulary to win 99% of
| the time.
|
| Actually, 99% may not even be achievable because
| sometimes your opponent will just luck out with letters
| and board lineup.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Be that as it may, Nigel Richards (the scrabble star in
| this story) apparently knows virtually every word
| regardless, and fairly minimal study (supposedly).
| ASUfool wrote:
| Sorry, but you do not *want to "basically memorize every
| word that uses the high scoring tiles." Rather, you want
| to study the low-scoring tile-filled words because those
| are more likely to be found on one's rack.
|
| A key to high-scoring games is scoring "bingos" or using
| all 7 letters in a rack in a single turn as it gives a 50
| point bonus. This is why we're taught to memorize the
| word lists that have such letters as TISANE in them as
| that string combines with most every other letter to make
| a bingo. The letters in TISANE are 1 point each.
|
| You also don't want to leave vowels (all of which are
| worth 1 point each) adjacent to the bonus squares. A
| parallel play with an I under/to the right of a triple-
| letter-square can easily score 62 if one puts a Q on the
| triple and another I to make QI both ways.
| 1209412comb wrote:
| How fast he was able to achieve this is amazing, but you
| probably can already do this with Chinese characters ( I
| assume you are from a Latin based language ), and even
| intuit how radicals combine into a character.
| latentsea wrote:
| Nope? Not at that pace anyway. At a fast pace for a
| human, yes, but not at 60x faster than "fast".
| stevage wrote:
| It's a tiny bit easier town that in that if you learn a
| tiny bit of grammar you can extrapolate sets of reloted
| words where you add an extra E or S or both.
| sionisrecur wrote:
| Avoid trying to make sense of how to write them based on
| how they sound seems like a start.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| mneumonic devices. 'memory palace' techniques. Currently
| learning spanish using this and it is pretty absurdly
| effective. Definitely couldn't do 40k words in 9 weeks, but
| obviously im a rank novice and this dude is a pro. But yeah
| I've memorized probably 2k words, their meanings, and their
| idiomatic usages in about 90 days using a program called
| learncraft spanish that uses mneumonic devices.
| mmmore wrote:
| Reportedly, by reading through the list twice and then
| reciting it to himself on bike rides.[1]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J
| mkl wrote:
| The article mentions this in the subtitle and body.
| zarzavat wrote:
| > You don't need to speak the language, just be really good at
| memorizing lists of words.
|
| That's half of it, the other prerequisite is that you have to
| be Nigel Richards.
| labster wrote:
| It's in the subtitle of the article that he also won a French
| tournament. Please read the article.
| saghm wrote:
| A while back on a similar story about English scrabble posted
| here, someone commented with a story about how they were in a
| tournament where their opponent played some super esoteric
| word, and then they played the word "twig", which their
| opponent immediately challenged.
|
| I have to imagine that at the highest levels play, people who
| are good at memorization will dominate regardless of fluency.
| slibhb wrote:
| Another piece of evidence in favor of my view that pretty much
| all competitive games and sports are awful when perfectly
| optimized.
| vunderba wrote:
| What does "perfectly optimized" even mean?
|
| If you're suggesting that a game feels less meaningful
| because its predisposed towards memorization, I'm not sure
| that leaves a lot of games left on the proverbial table for
| you.
|
| Furthermore, there's quite a bit more to Scrabble strategy
| such as:
|
| - balancing your rack
|
| - the natural RNG from drawing tiles
|
| - time pressure
|
| - anagramming
|
| I guess here's hoping you can start an international
| tournament of world champions for Snakes and Ladders, or
| Candyland?
|
| More seriously, perhaps you'd enjoy Fischer Chess.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
| etrautmann wrote:
| I agree with the parent that many games or sports are more
| fun to watch or participate in when not over optimized.
| Whether it's the metagame, memorizing two letter words, or
| nailing a perfect serve in tennis or volleyball. It's not
| fun for me to watch the very top where it's so far
| optimized to have less variability, less serendipity, and
| less fun. Basketball may be an exception to that. All of
| this is personal opinion.
| zem wrote:
| scrabble is by no means over optimised; the randomness
| means every move is different, and single-game upsets
| (someone beating a much higher ranked player) are very
| common. what makes a champion is winning over the course
| of tens of games.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| Memorizing the words is necessary but not sufficient, there
| is still a ton of strategy and interesting dynamics to
| scrabble beyond the word list. The one that's most
| interesting to me is that at high level play it starts as
| imperfect information game but progresses into a perfect
| information game. At the start your opponent's rack could
| have anything, but once the bag is mostly depleted the
| challenge is not just to find the best scoring play, but to
| find your best play relative to all your opponents best plays
| for all possible racks they could have.
| paulcole wrote:
| Incredible recall of such an obscure fact that isn't mentioned
| in the subtitle of the linked article.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| I have a vague memory of reading that scrabble in a language
| that you don't speak has its advantages, as your brain isn't
| wired to favour words that it uses more often which may not be
| so valuable in scrabble
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| I thought there's a rule you need to explain the word used
| when asked.
| wiether wrote:
| Knowing a word and its definition is not the same as using
| it daily, in writing or verbally.
|
| If I give you eight random letters and ask you to create
| words with them; if it's in a language that you use daily,
| you'll first see the ones that you use the most, not the
| longest/more complicated ones. Whereas if they should be
| picked from a dictionary, I can see that it could be easier
| to find long/complicated words, since you won't have a
| notion of "popular" words.
| dagw wrote:
| Being able to explain the word is a common house rule. The
| official rules only state that the word must be in an
| agreed upon standard dictionary (plus a few exceptions,
| like no abbreviations), which is the official Scrabble
| dictionary for competitions. As long as you can point to it
| there when challenged, you're good.
| lIl-IIIl wrote:
| And, in the case of Spanish, the conjugations, which are valid
| to play in Scrabble.
|
| Also you need to memorize the different point values of the
| letters and different tile frequencies for Spanish or French.
| ASUfool wrote:
| Actually, the point values should be printed on each tile so
| they do not have to be memorized, though it may help in
| considering the opponent's responses if they have certain
| letters that combine with yours.
|
| And it's also acceptable to have a pre-printed scoresheet
| where one can track the letters that have been played so that
| would show the frequency of each.
|
| Tracking helps one a lot at the end as you know what letters
| your opponent has and can adjust your play to suit. Of
| course, at most tournament level play, they have been
| tracking and know your final rack too.
| interludead wrote:
| It really challenges the assumption that language mastery is
| only about communication
| croisillon wrote:
| indeed! related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377311
| positr0n wrote:
| There's slightly more to it than that. There are also
| differences in strategy based on the differing distribution of
| letters in the game (Spanish removes some letters, adds other,
| adds n, and adds digraphs like LL, RR, and CH), differing
| distribution of letters in the spanish language, and some point
| value changes. This matters more in the probabilistic phase of
| the game than when scrabble transitions to a perfect
| information game in the end-game when no tiles are left in the
| bag (so each player know the board, their hand, and what the
| other player must have).
|
| You must develop a deep intuition for when to play the max
| scoring word you can find vs when to hold some letters in
| reserve in hopes of drawing even better hand next turn, etc.
| Sophira wrote:
| Will Anderson, another competitive Scrabble player and 2017 North
| America national champion, made an interesting and in-depth
| Scrabble analysis video about Nigel Richards' 2024 Spanish World
| Championship win that people here might enjoy watching:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RvNxkQ6Bgs
| edmn wrote:
| Thanks to Anderson, I anticipated that this would be Nigel
| Rogers before reading the article.
| munchler wrote:
| As a person who likes words, this is exactly why I dislike
| Scrabble. It's right up there with spelling bees.
| bubblyworld wrote:
| You're allowed to like words in whatever way you want, friend.
| Let's not invent a moral hierarchy where there isn't one.
| interludead wrote:
| There's no right way to enjoy words... Whether it's through
| playing Scrabble, writing poetry, or diving into etymology
| zem wrote:
| honestly, the scrabble world would have been a lot more surprised
| had he not won.
| precommunicator wrote:
| Someone should just make a Scrabble tournament in which the
| dictionary is just random strings that you just have to memorize
| yzydserd wrote:
| Competitive Scrabble has as much to do with language as
| competitive Sudoku has to do with mathematics.
| asimpleusecase wrote:
| Spanish, English and French have Latin roots. Whether Nigel knows
| Latin or not he had likely picked up on those underlying
| patterns.
| interludead wrote:
| A testament to the sheer power of memory, dedication, and pattern
| recognition
| jc_811 wrote:
| Interesting, I wonder if he also memorized all the irregular verb
| tenses? If so that is a serious feat.
|
| For example, future tense in the 2nd person adds "as" to the end
| of the verb. Pensar becomes pensaras. But, there are irregulars.
| You'd think the verb salir would be saliras (if you were
| memorizing), but it actually it saldras
|
| Seems like an incredible feat that goes beyond memorizing a
| dictionary. Unless Spanish scrabble maybe has specific rules
| around verb tenses and whatnot?
| karatinversion wrote:
| I don't know Spanish scrabble, but I have played Finnish
| scrabbe - another language that relies heavily on conjugation -
| and it disallows all conjugated and declined forms of words,
| except for nominative plurals.
| jc_811 wrote:
| Ah, makes sense :)
| omegaham wrote:
| I don't know about his Spanish Scrabble performance, but when
| he won the French Scrabble championship, there were players who
| attempted the French equivalent of "play saliras and see if he
| notices," and Nigel challenged all of them.
| paulcole wrote:
| When Scrabble players talk about a "dictionary" they really
| just mean a list of words that are acceptable.
|
| They're not actually learning anything other than "_______ is
| an acceptable string."
|
| So even if just "pensar" is in what you and I would call a
| "dictionary", the Scrabble-acceptable word list will contain
| every form of it.
| mmmore wrote:
| Nigel Richards reportedly[1] memorized the full French
| dictionary over the course of nine weeks (he doesn't speak
| French either). The way he did this is by reading through the
| dictionary twice and reciting the words to himself while on
| bike rides.
|
| He has an incredible mind.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J
| mihaic wrote:
| I'm surprised a bit that nobody here is turning this into a
| question of where do LLMs lie on the spectrum of "understanding"
| compared to this.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I came here to find/make this comment.
|
| This is pretty much _the_ argument on why LLMs do not perform
| "reasoning" in the same way we do.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I think we had the same case in France. It is impressive.
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| how can you memorize all words of a language and still not have
| command of it? that's a feat in and off itself it seems.
| jerf wrote:
| He memorized the series of valid letters. That's it. He still
| has no idea what "ongle" is, just that it's a perfectly valid
| French scrabble word. Certainly just knowing all the legal
| sequences of letters does not buy you much.
|
| If you study a language more distant from English than French,
| you'd be surprised at how even knowing all the meanings can
| still leave you pretty baffled at the meaning of a sentence.
|
| You do have to get farther away from English than French
| though; I can still half-read French off of a 4-year "not all
| that great" study in high school, and that's more a testament
| to how knowing enough English to recall Latin roots we don't
| use in our main vocabulary and some of the most common French
| words that are different from English is enough to read an
| awful lot of French from an English start than any skill of
| mine. I tried half-a-dozen words in Google Translate to pick my
| example above before I finally found a word that was either
| _different_ enough that it wasn 't basically the same as it is
| in English ("ski" -> "ski"), or something with enough Latin
| roots that English also uses that a strong English speaker
| would have a pretty decent chance of guessing ("smelly" ->
| "malodorant").
| akudha wrote:
| Bit off topic - where can we get free access to the various world
| scrabble championship games? English especially, but others are
| good too
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| A quick search gave me https://youtube.com/@NASPAScrabble/
| akudha wrote:
| Sorry, I meant to ask, game data (moves and such). That
| channel links to this site,
| https://www.scrabbleplayers.org/tourneys/2024/csw/lxt/11/ Not
| sure if they have the actual moves. Still looking
| ASUfool wrote:
| You can find many annotated games if you check some higher-
| ranked players at www.cross-tables.com. Pull up a player's page
| such as Mack Meller and there's a whole slew of games he's
| played which you can view.
| racl101 wrote:
| AY CARUMBA!
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| That he can do this is amazing. I wonder how he decides to pick
| up a new language of Scrabble, considering the near decade gap
| between French and Spanish.
|
| Also, what are the communication rules during play? Does he at
| least need to know enough Spanish to be able to issue or respond
| to a challenge?
| pvaldes wrote:
| Somebody has the huge talent to learn multiple languages and
| interact with millions on a privileged position, but choose
| instead to earn the title of "king of scrabble". I'm unsure about
| if this history is comedy or drama.
|
| My suggestion to this person would be to be much more ambitious
| with this life. He has the skills.
| diggan wrote:
| As far as I understand, he's not actually learning the
| languages he play in, he is "just" memorising words from the
| dictionary.
|
| Probably would make it way easier if he decided he wanted to
| learn one of those languages, but just knowing words doesn't
| make you proficient in comprehension and be able to create
| sentences.
| imzadi wrote:
| It's not even really learning the words, just how they are
| spelled. It's basically just pattern recognition.
| mulmen wrote:
| Who are you to tell someone how to live their life? Winning a
| Scrabble championship isn't hurting anyone.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| Not that I agree or disagree, but they probably think it's
| waste of intellect. Like how good will hunting portrays being
| a janitor a waste of his talents.
| mulmen wrote:
| Nobody has a right to another's intellect. It's totally
| unreasonable to criticize someone's life choices like this.
| talldayo wrote:
| Being a scrabble champion is not mutually exclusive to real-
| world impact. If a Scrabble expert lived a day in our shoes as
| software developers, I bet they'd think we're a net drain on
| society too.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Would you say the same about other silly things people pursue?
| We just had the article about the 18 year old chess champion.
| Surely dedicating your life to chess is about as silly as
| dedicating your life to scrabble. But we celebrate the chess
| master, and don't wonder aloud why he didn't pursue more
| ambitions things...
| Thorrez wrote:
| >interact with millions on a privileged position
|
| What does this mean? Does learning multiple languages
| automatically make you famous? 43% of the world's population is
| bilingual.
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