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    [Del 1 - Scrabble Notation]

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    [Del 3 - Possible Word Retrieval]

    [Del 4 - Simple AI player]

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    [CS 298 Proposal]

    [CS 298 Report_PDF]

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Deliverable 1: Simple Scrabble Notation System

This deliverable is used to find scrabble game notation using human players only. A 15x15 square Game board has been created to place the words.There are 100 tiles in the tile bag, 98 tiles are English alphabets that are associated with a predefined letter and point. Two Blank tiles are represented as '_'. Blanks can be replaced with any letter, however, it cannot earn any points.

A. Player Notation System:

In this project, the player notation is designed to identify a human play. A set of inputs such as the direction of placement (H/V where H denotes horizontal and V denotes vertical placement), X and Y coordinates of the game board to place the desired letter and, tiles from the rack that form the word are played on each turn. Each human player is supposed to enter the following four parameters as comma separated value to run the program.
  1. Direction of play (h/H denotes horizontal direction and v/V denotes vertical direction)
  2. Board Y coordinate (A-O) or column
  3. Board X coordinate (0-14) or row
  4. Tiles from the rack to form a word('_' used for blanks)
A player has to place the letter tiles from his own rack. These tiles are hooked to an existing tile of the game board in all the plays except the first play. Thus the words formed in the subsequent plays would be an extension to the words formed in the preceding play. The play gets nullified when there are no anchor letters in the given board coordinate to hook to the new word.

We also maintain the current board state, current rack state, the remaining number of tiles in the tile bag and player's rack on each turn. These are significant elements that can later turn our game of imperfect information to a perfect one.

B. ASCII Board Representation:

As the game board is a 15x15 square matrix, rows are numbered from 0 to 14 and columns are labeled with alphabet letters A to O. Blank tiles in the rack are represented as '_'in the program. When a player draws a blank tile from the rack, the program asks to enter a replacement letter. In Scrabble, there is a concept of bonus points for game squares on the board. According to the board notation system, *2 indicates Double Letter Bonus and *3 indicates Triple Letter Bonus. Similarly, DW and TW represents Double Word and Triple Word Bonus points.

The figure shown below is a sample representation of the Scrabble Game board after the first play using the word FAR. Statistical chart Fig.1. Scrabble game board representation