I Played a Giant Robot in Scrabble
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
- In 2018, I played an exhibition best-of-3 match against a Scrabble-playing robot created by Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). This was one of the most unique things I've ever had the opportunity to do in my Scrabble career, so I wanted to share it with all of you as well.
Much of the gameplay footage is from John Chew, CEO of NASPA, used with permission - thanks John!
For more Scrabble content from me, follow my Twitch channel:
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I also have a weekly show on the official Scrabble Twitch channel (Tuesdays 3-5 PM ET)
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Play Scrabble at playscrabble.com! - เกม
I would be so frustrated a team of engineers didn't bother to read the rules of the game lmao
my only guess is that it might be because programming accounting for those hooks would be a whole additional meat and potato nightmare to code. that being said, if you're going to broadcast this as some amazing scrabble bot, its definitely something to mention, lol
@@kenedic7495 I would guess missing the hooks isn’t a rule reading issue but a programming edge case issue.
Also it’s pretty clear they are WAY more invested in the physical part than the scrabble specifically.
@@kenedic7495 There are existing scrabble engines, though. So by changing the rules, they probably made themselves more work, having to implement it themselves.
@@kenedic7495 As an engineer, no it would not be difficult to implement the hooks.
@@kenedic7495 Perhaps. There are a whole bunch of Scrabble AIs out there though, including some open source ones.
Huge respect for taking the no-hooking "rule" as a challenge and seeing it as an interesting variation! I can't imagine how frustrating that must've been.
Appreciate that...it was a little weird for sure, but they were so apologetic, and I kinda knew going in that it wouldn't be a normal game. I just didn't realize *how* abnormal!
@@wanderer15I like that playing without hooks is more abnormal to you than playing an actual robot!
To be fair to him he already had a massive advantage of seeing his opponent's pieces and the next pieces to be drawn. And the robot had to adhere to the same rules. He's still a great sport for continuing to play!
Next time someone plays a bingo against me that I don't know, I'll just go full robot
*Oops. Please follow the rules*
_stares at opponent until they take back the word_
😂
LOL
Will's willingness to accept obstacles like "my opponent clearly doesn't know the rules of Scrabble" as a fun and interesting challenge to overcome is just one of many reasons I have so much respect for him.
I wish they programmed itt so the robot whirrs, sparks and then blows up after you beat it
So do I!
You'd think the scrabble bot programmers would have taught it how to play SCrabble
Why? Most programmers are incompetent. This is about what you can expect.
I can appreciate the robotics, but inviting a master scrabble player to challenge your robot when it can't actually play scrabble due to how its robotic fingers grasp the pieces is so misguided. I have to imagine the no hooking rule is just a consequence of how it picks up pieces, and someone on the team who knew just kept their mouth shut when someone said "let's let our machine play scrabble".
@@effanineffablesI don't know why the "no hooks" rule would have anything to do with how the bot picks up tiles. There's no practical difference between a hook and playing through, from the perspective of holding the blocks.
@@evanbelcherI think it's related to it being more dificult for the robot to place them without messing with adjacent tiles
@@lipeeefl The scrabble board they use is completely flat (not small square pockets for the tiles to sit in) and the tiles played look very neatly placed. I think the robot is pretty dexterous. No hooks is either something they overlooked, or something that would increase the amount of options so much that they couldnt make a program able to handle it all.
That, "Please follow the rule" was pretty intimidating.
So basically the robot's strategical twists that you mentioned was about changing the game rules :D
I'm really impressed how quickly you adapted to the robot and the modified version you played! Immediately strategizing around it is really cool to see too.
I feel like it would have been perfectly fine if the “rule changes” were communicated ahead of time. I don’t understand how they thought it would be ok to just let him discover the rule changes as he played.
Maybe they didn't realize that it was programmed incorrectly
@@jh0ker Idk, I find it really hard to believe they put in that much effort into creating a Scrabble robot to not know hooks are a thing or how the final move of the game works. I mean, it’s possible.
@@ShuffleboardJerk There are incompenet people everywhere, especially in programming.
@@ShuffleboardJerk They made the scrabble playing part as a gimmick to show off the control and machine vision capabilities of the robot. They probably didn't even consider using an existing engine because the person making the scrabble portion likely threw it together without any idea it was going to be more than just a silly tech demo.
@@plukerpluck Oh, is the robot capable of other things? I thought it was Scrabble-only.
The machines already took chess from us. Scrabble must be defended.
why is this the first time I'm hearing of this? if I ever played a giant scrabble robot for the fate of humanity that would be the first thing I tell anyone when I meet them.
Your vids are awesome dude, really getting into the game from them!
Couriway spotted
couriway spotted
Same! Cool to see y'alls different fandoms booping :)
couriway??
I just realized with words like zeolite, ionomer, piezo and of course oxyphenbutazone my chemistry and material science background gives me an casuals advantage in vocabulary
What I really enjoy about this channel is the stories that I would normally never hear off. Also I enjoy the game Scrabble (and also Wordfeud, a variant of scrabble), because I have played this for many years in my own language (Dutch). It is also really interesting to see the similarities between Scrabble and chess, in which you both have to be aware of your opponents play and be able to play defensively and offensively at the right times.
Great observations regarding Scrabble and chess. Thanks for the kind words!
I’m so glad I discovered your channel! It’s a blast and your Scrabble skills are truly amazing and tantalizing
Your latest videos are all very high quality and thoroughly entertaining, thanks for your great work!
Great video Will. Look forward to more uploads.
I really appreciate your effort to make our beloved game more common to people and enjoyable to watch without even understanding Scrabble too deeply. Keep up the good work, Will!
I'm addicted to scrabble since finding your channel.
Thanks for buying us a few more years before the AI overlords take over Will
I made a similar bot. I paid Nigel Richards 3000 to play a game inside a robot costume.
Next I was expecting you to say the robot was allowed to choose which tiles it draws a la ISC 😂. Great video Will, keep these up!
That was incredibly cool but very shocking that they miscoded the ruleset
Great video. Love your content.
I didn't know scrabble youtube is a thing but I'm hooked!
Not in this video - the robot didn't allow hooks 😂
The true rebellious warrior against the Lexical Automaton Invasion. Hats off to Will, everyone!
Great video! Humanity is defended.
I'm 99% certain that the lack of blanks was due to vision issues, not game play related programming issues.
You’re like John Henry defeating the machine && reminding us all of our humanity.
We need more of these videos
No we don't.
What did you do last Saturday?
Me: Oh just sat at home and watched the best scrabble content on the internet.
lmao!
someone needs to make a scrabble animation bc this variation wwith all its twists feels like the sort of thing that would fill a 22 minute slot
Thank you for sharing!
Cool topic Will!
thank you for your service mr anderson
2:55 It's not a bug, it's a ✨f e a t u r e✨
congrats will, you showed him :)
The scientists didn’t even know the rules, how did they not figure this out before the match lol This is why they have a reputation for arrogance. It’s pretty cool that you could adapt so well.
The chapter titles say all three games are in the video, but only two of them are here.
Very interesting!!
Interesting coincidences. An angleworm is a worm used for angling (hooking AKA fishing); and then it also extended "fish" to "icefish". Also, kitty cats like to eat fish, so we have these three pairs themed (more or else).
Good one! ❤
I got a bit confused about the "no-hooks" rule/glitch/variation when I saw 2-letter words were accepted (like with the SEMI(N)A play, for example). I am guessing that the rule/glitch/variation was that a play must go through an existing letter, but can form hooks as well?
An easier way of formulating the rule is that only plays that can be expressed with parentheses are allowed. So SEMI(N)A fits that bill, as does (INOTROPE)S, but not EPEEIST or anything hooking INOTROPE, which could not be expressed with parentheses.
Humanity thanks you.
do AI scrabble contests exist? I wonder if there is the equivalent of an ELO rating for scrabble like there is in chess.
Thanks for defending mankind 😂. Nice one Will
Im surprised that they didnt add any kind of rule override functionality to the robot to protect against those errors.
I'd like to see online sites offer this "through an existing tile" variant to simplify the game for non-experts.
Presumably the developers spent millions on this robot that specifically plays scrabble, but they didn't look up the rules to scrabble? I get the blank thing, but the no hook thing and the endgame thing is just weird. When you played SEMINA in game 1, you were hooking the other words with the overlaps. I don't think that's any different to (FLEAM)S.
I think the hook issue is less “we didn’t read the rules” and more “the way we check for valid words used an assumption that accidentally missed the case where you hook”
Endgame ruling is more of a rules issue.
The key difference with the play of SEMI(N)A versus the other failed plays is that it plays through a letter already on the board. Will was allowed to hook words, so long as his word played through an existing letter.
@@axcertypo u cheet
The robot doesn't specifically play scrabble. It can pick up and place cubes accurately using vision processing. The scrabble is almost certainly just an amusing tech demo, hence why it wasn't implemented properly.
Not today, robots!
Lmao "the sheer size of it was intimidating"
-Make a robot to play the game
-Call the NA Champion
-Don't bother to learn about the game's rules
I’m interested.
You obviously made concessions to the robot to play the game. But they could have tested these before hand with just any in house player who has ever played scrabble.
Did they tell you if the robot was capable of making bluff words?
From the lack of rule understanding, I assume that the robot was more about fine motor control.
And an advanced version might cover strategy and language. A robot that has the dictionary memorised is different to a robot that has tried to understand English. But a robot that can bluff a word and hope a human believes it would be a break through in computer science.
The robot simply played the highest scoring valid move available each turn - no bluffs, no strategy. Bluffing is certainly doable in theory and maybe closer than ever to reality thanks to large language models.
How....odd. They made a robot that can read the board, place tiles, and otherwise interact with a human user, but they didn't bother to do the easiest part -- program an actual functional scrabble game? Which, I hasten to add, is by a wide margin the easiest part of the process?
I guess it's CES, so they probably weren't anywhere near done with the thing and just had to demo what they had.
There's a reason that the main engineer is an engineer and not a scientist. He knows how to give instructions to a machine, but he isn't able to give the machine any useful instructions.
The house rule I always played with was you had to use it in a sentence *before* looking it up in the dictionary. If your sentence was wrong, it still comes off the board.
Very reasonable rule, although that does allows for some subjectivity - your definition might be pretty close but not exactly accurate, and then it's tough to know what to do, whereas looking up just the word is a lot easier - it's either in there, or it's not.
C’mon engineers, you literally had the requirements for successfully creating a robot that plays scrabble right in front of you in the form of the rule book. Seems like it would be a simple enough thing to fix though
Where to begin if google bard or chatGPT starterd playing those offboard words against the robot.. Humanity is definitely safe in the scrabble world for a bit..
So if the board had a box of AAAA that's game over?
This is really strange to me. A humanoid Scrabble robot doesn't seem that difficult to create, and I think it wouldn't be too hard to make it play on a real board with normal tiles, blanks, etc.
The actual AI part is either the easiest or hardest part of the process depending on how far you wanna go. The easy way is to plug in an open-source Scrabble AI that someone has already made.
With that part done, building a robot that can see, pick up, and move pieces is not too complicated. Computer vision can be hard with complex objects, but tiles on a flat plane are about as straightforward as it gets, so I doubt tracking them would be too challenging. Robot arms have also gotten really good in the last few decades, so picking up the tiles can't be too hard either.
I just don't get it. I don't want to talk shit about the institute that made this robot, I'm sure they worked hard and ran into problems I'm not considering, but I can't help but feel like this is a compsci bachelor degree project.
😂
Well said. The robot designers missed the mark on this one.
It is not easy to build a robot that can visually read a real scrabble board in real time, interpret it into strategy and respond without disturbing any existing tiles. Also it’s ability to successfully play (even a simplified) version of scrabble is very impressive
Consider that it is a higher likelihood that the software is built inhouse for the showcase. The robot is not really designed specifically for scrabble, they just threw their own module in because that is the only way you can ensure its compatibility. If it is one thing the devs learn, it is that they need to make sure they read the rulebook properly before making a showcase.
I feel like the blanks might still be a bit much. I've seen the way ChatGPT plays chess, and it suggests that at the moment, we haven't quite mastered giving AIs object permanence. Reading the board is fine, but I have doubts about their abilities to remember what letter a blank is representing, especially in a situation where there are multiple letters out could feasibly represent and therefore it can't just "fill in the blanks" from its database of legal words--to say nothing of its own ability to play a blank.
I'm sure some day we will be able to build such a robot. And you're probably right about it being possible to build one now that could handle a regulation Scrabble set aside from the blanks.
KEEP YOUR MIND SHARP! CIAO!
I dont understand how the robot was able to play "GRR." I thought hooking "SEMINAR" would have violated the no hooks rule. Is it allowed because its *also* playing through a word?
That's right - as long as a play was through a word, it could also form hooks. The way I understood it in the moment was as long as the play could be expressed with parentheses, it was acceptable. That's why any play hooking INOTROPE would not have been allowed, but (INOTROPE)S was allowed.
Garry and deepblue right here
How is SEMINA allowed with the constraints?
Because it plays through the N of INOTROPE already on the board, it passes the requirement that I play through a letter. Because of that, I’m allowed to form parallel plays too.
Robot tried to cheat and you still won! 😆
So how exactly did GRR and SEMINA count as valid? Both created multiple words
With SEMINA you are using the INOTROPES as the tile you are playing it on, same with GRR using the 2nd G or RAGING.
This compared to the hook on FLEAM you are not using. I think if you would make a 6-8 letter word ending with E where an A would get ahead of CHING then it would be counted as valid as well since you would use the already existing E as the base for the word
It appears that hooks are not forbidden; they just aren't enough to enable you to play a word. In those cases, GRR and SEMINA did get played through existing words.
Wait, so semina works, but not epeeist?
because SEMI(N)A played through that N on the board, it was allowed, even though it had overlap words as well. Basically, as long as you could express your play with parentheses, the play was acceptable. That's why (INOTROPE)S was playable, but EPEEIST was not.
Looks like you saw a few different viewer requests of adding the word definitions to your videos. Thanks for a great video
6:42 Why was the robot allowed to Play KITTY when it hoooked TE_ .... and how could it play GRR and SEMINAR....
As long as a play passed through a letter on the board already, it was also allowed to hook other words. To put it another way, the play had to be expressed with parentheses. So KITT(Y), SEMI(N)A, and (G)RR were all acceptable on that basis by connecting to letters already on the board, whereas EPEEIST was not.
it really offense me when i heard the AI doesn’t even play by the real rule lmao. ur a super advanced player so i know how open minded u would be. its like put king in d8 rather than e8 in chess game. whole different game.
Damn, too bad we couldn't see more of what kind of point bonuses exist past the borders of human play. Maybe next time.
It's possible that this robot is even worse than it appears. It actually plays a hook at the end of game 1, with SEMINAR.
This implies that not only does it have poor understanding of the rules, but it also is poor at recognizing hooks at all. I think maybe it only intended to play GRR and didnt even see the hook. This would also explain why the 2-letter overlaps are allowed throughout the game, it might not even see them!
I think the bot is literally just checking 2 conditions: 1. Is the word valid? And 2. Does the word use a letter already on the board?
If thats the case then this is one of the sloppiest programming jobs I've ever seen in my life
The logic the robot used was simply - does the candidate word play through a letter on the board? If no, it’s not a valid play. If yes, all the other words formed by the play must also be valid. The SEMINAR move passes this check.
@@wanderer15 they had code that checked for valid hooks but it only activated under specific arbitrary conditions?? Jesus christ that's even worse
...I knew "épéeist" was a thing, but I still have no idea how you'd *find* that...
For a player like Will finding words like that is relatively trivial. He just knows it by rearranging the letters on his rack in abc order (known as an alphagram) and memorizing that the alphagram translates into a word.
I don't use alphagrams, but epee is a relatively common word in scrabble as it dumps multiple e's at once. Even lower level players have memorized and are trained to see these types of words as they are extremely useful in games, especially words that dump multiple of the same letter.
I would have arranged -IEST or -IST on my rack first as those are common suffixes and then noticed the remaining tiles make PEE or EPEE and put them together.
The other guy is also right that a player of Will's level has the alphagram memorized and saw this word instantly without much thought.
its a very good vowel dump, pro scrabble players love learning these to get rid of duplicates.
How cool (you, not the robot)
i only saw two games
Did the robot not break its own rules by hooking (SEMINA)R for (G)RR?
As long as the move played through an existing letter on the board, it could *also* form a hook. So because (G)RR technically played through the existing G, the fact that the R also hooked was okay.
Got it, thank you for the clarification!
I'm a developer - not allowing hooks is a REALLY bad look for this company. Creating QA plans for board games is about as easy as it gets - the rules are all literally written out for you to build tests from. They either didn't give their devs enough time or - more likely, as it's notoriously underinvested by bad CTOs - have very, very poor QA investment and practices. Not what you want in a robot that can cause physical harm.
honestly its kinda disrespectful to invite the top scrabble player of your region to play against you, but not even bother to program the game they play (and supposedly your robot too) correctly... if these variations in rules were there for a good reason and were communicated in advance thatd be fine. but i strongly doubt engineers capable of creating such a powerful robot wouldnt have been able to correctly program scrabble if they wanted. genuinely kinda pathetic on their part, and good on you for keeping your cool and going with it!!
I think their lead engineer understand the gravity of the mistake. When it sunk in that parallel plays should’ve been allowed, his manner suggested that he seriously expected I was going to get up and walk out. I play Scrabble variants all the time so it was really no big deal to me. But I do get what you’re saying. It was a surprising error on their part.
CUBES
You are too diplomatic about the Scrabble bot's AI. Inexcuseable that it doesn't play by the proper rules and that they didn't organize a dry run-through with you.
Pretty sure Google Bard would crush this robot and all of humanity (at Scrabble).
Just be thankful this didn’t happen: th-cam.com/video/l295j5IifeE/w-d-xo.html
A03 Rumbo Babylon, Limb By LImb, Latoya, Tables Will Turn
they just programmed it to make basic moves? lame
Scrabble looks so fun but my spelling isn't close to good enough to actually enjoy playing in 🥲