Academic literature on the topic 'Math SCRABBLE'

Nigel Richards is a New Zealand–Malaysian professional Scrabble player (yes, there are professional Scrabble players). His mother recalled that, “When he was learning to talk, he was not interested in words, just numbers. He related everything to numbers.” When he was 28, she challenged him to play Scrabble: “I know a game you’re not going to be very good at, because you can’t spell very well and you weren’t very good at English at school.” Four years later, Richards won the Thailand International (King’s Cup), the world’s largest Scrabble tournament. He went on to win the U.S., U.K., Singapore, and Thailand championships multiple times. He won the Scrabble World Championship in 2007, 2011, and 2013. (The tournament is held every two years and he was runner-up in 2009). In May 2015, Richards decided to memorize the 386,000 words that are allowed in French Scrabble. (There are 187,000 allowable words in North American Scrabble.) He doesn’t speak French beyond bonjour and the numbers he uses to record his score each turn. Beyond that, Richards paid no attention to what the French words mean. He simply memorized them. Nine weeks later, he won the French-language Scrabble World Championship with a resounding score of 565–434 in the championship match. If he had studied 16 hours a day for 9 weeks, he would have an average of 9 seconds per word to memorize all 386,000 words in the French Scrabble book. However, Richards reportedly doesn’t memorize words one by one; instead, he goes page by page, with the letters absorbed into his memory, ready to be recalled as needed when he plays Scrabble. Richards played as quickly and incisively in the French tournament as he does in English-language tournaments, giving no clue that he cannot actually communicate in French. For experts like Richards, Scrabble is essentially a mathematical game of combining tiles to accumulate points while limiting the opponent’s opportunities to do the same and holding on to letters that may be useful in the future. The important skills are an ability to recognize patterns and calculate probabilities. There is no need to know what any of the words mean.

Some days, now that I have crested 50, I find myself surprised to be, of all things, a science reporter on a daily newspaper in a small but sophisticated city and immersed every day in a world of stem cells, radio-collared bald eagles, flakes of Martian meteorites, and strange deer diseases. I can't imagine a place I'd rather be at this point in my life, though sometimes the haphazard way I got here, the serendipitous nature of it all, makes my head spin—not to mention the fearful task of trying to make something called “proteomics” understandable for an audience that has maybe a minute and a half to read what I've written. After all, I made a terrible mess of the frog I was supposed to dissect in high school all those years ago. And trying to figure out exactly what Mendel was doing with all of those pea plants drove me nuts. Math? Well, suffice it to say that my problems with algebra and equations are what drove me to a career in journalism. Still, here I am, settled in Madison, Wisconsin, in the upper Midwest of America, carrying around business cards that identify me as science and environment reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal. In a recent, typical week, I researched and wrote a column about robotics, pounded out a quick news feature about why the human body gets cold in winter, made pesky phone calls to state officials about why they aren't enforcing the state's new pollution law, and churned out news briefs on everything from clouds of ionized hydrogen in the solar system to a pollution permit hearing for a local manufacturing plant. Between assignments, I had time to give a talk about science writing to a local high school biology class and to win one of the ongoing games of Scrabble in the cubicle at the newspaper where I make my workday home. Not a day goes by that I don't worry about losing this good job. That's because full-time science reporters on small to mid-sized daily newspapers in this country are an endangered species.