Many of the best Scrabble players are Thais who don't speak English (2014)

http://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/features/2014/08/16/the-best-scrabble-players-in-the-world-are-thais-who-dont-speak-english/

by Tomte • 9 years ago

48 16 9 years ago

thestar.com.my

FeteCommuniste• 9 years ago

The champion of French Scrabble a couple years back was a New Zealander who didn't speak the language: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/...

paulcole• 9 years ago

The 2017 National Scrabble Championships are going on now and you can follow along here:

http://event.scrabbleplayers.org/games/nsc2017/

contingencies2• 9 years ago

As an abugida versus an alphabet, Thai and English are not that different in structural conception, though Thai has almost double the number of consonants.

spraak• 9 years ago

Not that different in structural composition...? I don't follow what you mean. I do speak some Thai, too

peteretep• 9 years ago

The op means: the letters map vaguely to the sounds used to produce them.

Also speaking some Thai, I'm like you unsure this is any kind of useful insight. More useful would be that there's enough Latin alphabet signs in Thailand that all literate Thais can already sound-out English, even if they don't understand it.

mathattack• 9 years ago

If understanding isn't important, wouldn't a halfway decent AI kill most players in the game?

pesenti• 9 years ago

Scrabble is an easily solved problem... No AI necessary, just brute force.

ClassyJacket• 9 years ago

Yes, it would, and it does. Or not so much AI as brute force code. You can download a Scrabble cheating app on the iPhone right now.

princeb• 9 years ago

this is a fairly interesting question for you to ask.

i put it to you to think about how you can write a scrabble solver, if you're given the official word list. I don't think it's that much of a step up from a sudoku solver!

greenpenguin• 9 years ago

This article appears to originally be from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/06/scrabb...

The site also features several other Guardian articles by the same author. Seems a little iffy?

ciaranm• 9 years ago

The 'comment is free' section of the guardian is their freelancer/blog bit. What you're probably seeing is the same author being paid for the same piece from multiple sources. Not all that fishy, just the way freelancing works.

nemoniac• 9 years ago

Amusingly, not once does the article mention that it's about English-language Scrabble and not Thai-language Scrabble.

mvid• 9 years ago

That would seem implied, otherwise why would this be an interesting story?

barking• 9 years ago

More recently, there was a lot of comment last year about the strength of Nigerian scrabble players, such as this : http://www.slate.com/articles/life/gaming/2016/05/have_niger...

Many of the best Scrabble players are Thais who don't speak English (2014)

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