My mom uses math to win, at scrabble, and words with friends.

As you know, I blog about the users of untrained math on this blog, usually myself. I didn't think I would have a post about someone else this early on. Much less my mother.

My mother uses math to win at Words With Friends, and Scrabble. My mother occasionally asks me to play facebook games with her, and sometimes I do. Well she has had a history of winning in the game, so I thought I would take it up a notch, and just try to cream her using an anagram search, and just sort of eyeballing what word was the best score for me to place from there. Granted not a holistic approach, but I thought the edge of having the anagram tool would guarantee me a win. In the two games we played simultaneously she beat me by over 100 points in both. I asked her how she did it, but she just laughed at me. I later admitted using the anagram tool and she said someone else who she had beat had admitted to using a tool that did some kind of screen reading and then decided your play for you. My mom beat whoever's algorithm that is.

So to you unknown programmer, let me just say:



MY MOM, CAN BEAT YOUR MOM, AT WORDS WITH FRIENDS, WITH MATH



I know I should say that programmer's algorithm but saying mom felt you know, better.

I've been staying with them this past week. And while I didn't continue to pester her about it the seed was planted. And sometimes at night, she'll come looking for me, to ask me how to spell things. The seed kept getting watered. I saw her today writing in a list, of words that looked to be written in rot13. She was playing words with friends, so I knew it was part of her strategy so I asked her about it and this was her run down.

1. You play the board for score, make sure you hit as many of the double word, double letter, triple letter etc. tiles as you can.

2. She believes that there are essentially 12 letters that most words begin with so she compiled lists of words with those letters, seperated by word length and used that to pick her words given the situation.

3.She also composed pages, for J and Q, because they were high point letters.(Presumably x as well)

4. Never use a vowel as a starting letter

There's no reason to talk about number one it's just a good general strategy hint. Number two is interesting, because she used the dictionary in words with friends and scrabble, to create a tertiary brute force usable dictionary. This is constructed using the scrabble/words with friends dictionary, using something like combinatorics, but with more assumptions about patterns. And three is again just good strategy if your already building a dictionary why not supplement with something that has a high score section that isn't very dense. Diminishing returns are then being accounted for.

I'm going to provide some figures so we can figure if my mom eyeballing it about the letters is close, as in do you suffer diminishing returns, after 12 letters.

Here is a sorted list of wordcounts, from the words with friends dictionary:

 173122 total
  19004 swords
  16236 cwords
  14612 pwords
  10479 awords
  10173 rwords
  10163 dwords
   9637 mwords
   9296 bwords
   8758 twords
   7078 ewords
   6989 iwords
   6746 fwords
   6312 hwords
   5854 owords
   5595 gwords
   5079 uwords
   5073 lwords
   4381 nwords
   3708 wwords
   2749 vwords
   1734 kwords
   1386 jwords
    839 qwords
    556 ywords
    549 zwords
    136 xwords

Here it is without vowels:

 173122 total
  19004 swords
  16236 cwords
  14612 pwords
  10173 rwords
  10163 dwords
   9637 mwords
   9296 bwordst
   8758 twords
   6746 fwords
   6312 hwords
   5595 gwords
   5073 lwords
   4381 nwords
   3708 wwords
   2749 vwords
   1734 kwords
   1386 jwords
    839 qwords
    556 ywords
    549 zwords
    136 xwords

I'd say the diminishing returns probably start at fwords, so s words to t words is 8 rather than 12. I'm not going to name the letters she used cause that's still her secret sauce, because they aren't including all the most popular, it's a strange mix and I don't know how it was picked. Oh and as a bonus she has a list of compound words, words that are generally longer than a single play, so you have a premade list of just words you might add on too, that someone else played.

Keep in mind my sorting didn't include word density either.

In closing, my mom's strategy probably is not perfect, I do think there is something to be said for human pattern recognition, that's probably helping her skip some math steps I'm not listing, or she just has some miscalculations.  That doesn't change the fact, my mom can beat your mom at scrabble using math.

Also I'll be putting the one liners used to put these lists together today at the bottom of my end of the day blog post at Bsdpunk blog.