The board game to end all board games
Yes, it's true: I really enjoy the Milton-Bradley board game of
Scrabble®. Since January 1994, I've spent a good deal of time
on-line at John
Chew's crossword-game
DOoM
servers. You can read more about them by selecting the preceding link,
or:
- To access MarlDOoM via telnet, select
here; to browse MarlDOoM on
the web directly, select here.
- To access PoslDOoM via telnet, select
here; to
browse PoslDOoM on the web directly, select
here.
ACBot: a crossword-game playing robot
One of my major contributions to the DOoMs has been ACBot, a program
that plays on-line.
- You can read a document
that describes ACBot and the companion program, the game critiquer,
in detail.
- Confused about how to use ACBot's powerful
words
command? Here's a comprehensive set of
instructions and examples to help you along.
- You can submit logs of your real-life games to me for critiquing via
email. To read about the exact format required, see
this document.
- An article written by Eric Berlin about his experience playing
ACBot on-line appeared in "Internet World". You can read it
here.
- I was interviewed on CBC radio in Ottawa about ACBot.
You can read a transcript of that show here.
- If you want to download the latest complete source code (including
the
Makefile
) via anonymous FTP from
ftp://ro.doe.carleton.ca/pub/scrabble/acbot.tar.gz
,
you can select
this
link. The file is stored as a tar
archive and is
compressed using gzip
, and is about 75,000 bytes.
Related things
- You can see critiques of some notable games by following the links
below:
- I had ACBot play 5000 games against itself so that I could analyze
them. A survey of the results is
given. As well, lists of all of the seven-letter
words and eight-letter words played
in those games are available.
- I've written a program that critiques Anagrams games, given a log of
the tiles turned over and the words played. You can see a critique of a
real-life game played at the Enfield tournament from December 1995
here.
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Last updated: March 7, 2001