The worm

Inspired by the worm graphic used by TV stations to monitor politicians’ credibility as they debated, I tried to show the fluctuating fortunes round by round in a tournament. Your worm goes up if you win, down if you lose.

I’m still experimenting, but here are the worms for the Australian Championships 2007, Masters and Plate.
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Masters
Top 10: David Eldar, Chiah Siu Hean, Chris May, David Lowden, Simon Walton, Andrew Fisher, Rod Talbot, Gerry Carter, Bob Jackman, Michael Hornung.

Click to enlarge

Plate
Top 10: Nick Cavenagh, Quentin Abbott, Sherie Brown, Sharon Sorensen, Matthew Forno, George Khamis, Natalie Tadday, Matthew Selvanera, Margaret Andrews, Jane Taylor
Click to enlarge

Including all competitors makes it rather messy, but here they are:

Masters

Plate

Lampflash : word study (Palm)

Lampflash is a freeware flashcard program for studying words. You cannot create your own lists, but many study sets are available at the Lampflash website.

http://www.houtens.com/lampflash/

Round robin for logophiles

Here’s a novel way to play a round robin tournament for eight people (i.e. a schedule of seven rounds where each player plays everyone else). Assign the following nametags to the players.

BAGNIOS BUSIEST CONCISE CURTALS LARCENY LEGIBLE PENNANT POSTBOY

In round one, the players who have the same first letter play each other (eg BAGNIOS plays BUSIEST). In the second round, players with the same second letter play each other (eg POSTBOY plays CONCISE) and so on.

Finding a set of words like this is difficult. The problem was posed in 1978, and after several computer programs tried and failed, it was written off as impossible. However twenty years later a set of 63 solutions was found by Steve Root. Read more of the story and see Steve’s 63 solutions at http://wordways.com/every.htm. The richer SOWPODS lexicon should produce more than 63 solutions. Any takers?

KDIC – Words and meanings (Palm)

Word mode:

List mode;

There are several dictionary programs for Palm devices. However only a few are able to use a custom-made dictionary. One which I discovered some years ago is KDIC, primarily designed for Japanese-English and similar. KDIC is not free, but will work perfectly while it is yet unregistered, displaying a small message under the definition.

KDIC website http://www002.upp.so-net.ne.jp/kei-k/

I have created a dictionary of use to Scrabble players. It is far from perfect, but it is at least somewhat useful.
Scrabble dictionary http://members.dodo.com.au/~sparrowfart/

Crosswords – Scrabble game (Palm)

It is a bit of a squeeze trying to get a decent display of a Scrabble board onto a tiny PDA device, but Crosswords by Eric House does so quite well. On the cheapest Palm devices (eg Palm Zire Z22) it is a bit cramped (hint: use preferences, and untick “Larger board” on these smaller devices). On better models eg TX, the display is beautiful.

The most usual setup will be one human player versus the computer, and the computer usually beats me because of its perfect vocabulary and finding highest scoring plays. It plays with no strategic viewpoint as far as I can see. You can also click on the light bulb icon to see high scoring possibilities for your own rack. (Hint: if you want to confine suggestions to ones that, say, don’t use your blank, move the blank to the left edge of your rack and move the divider to isolate th blank to the left of the divider).

Crosswords is postcardware released under the GNU Public Licence. If you use it and like it, you should send a postcard to the author, Eric House. He certainly deserves that at least.

Crosswords http://xwords.sourceforge.net

Target word puzzle (Palm)

Another free program for Palm PDAs is Target, by Tony Sloane. In a rare but commendable manner, it is able to tap into the lexicon of words installed with Lampwords, thus saving unnecessary duplication of data files. The program recreates the type of puzzle often printed in newspapers, where a set of nine letters is shown in a 3×3 grid, and you are challenged to find as many words as you can using four or more of the letters, but stipulating that the letter in the centre of the grid must be one of them.

http://web.mac.com/inkytonic/iWeb/inkytonik/target.html

Lampwords – anagrams and more (Palm)

The most useful piece of software for Scrabble aficionados with a Palm PDA is LAMPWords. After game postmortems can be quickly and easily done.

eg what word(s) can be made from HISRAVE?
Input: HISRAVE, press button ANA, answer is ASHIVER#
(the # denotes OSWi only, so not available in North America)

What word can be made from TRANDLE? None. But what about combining with some eighth letter on the board?
Input: TRANDLE?, press button ANA, answers are ANTLERED, ARDENTLY,DENTURAL

What front hooks can go onto OWE?
Input: ?OWE, press button PAT, answers are HOWE, LOWE, YOWE

The anagram search is the most useful. Pattern search is useful for eg hooks.

The program can be used as a word judge.


The software is free, generously provided by Canadian Scrabble player, Paul Sidorsky. The database of allowable words has been carefully assembled by Scrabble enthusiasts James Cherry and MW Thelen.

Lampwords http://members.shaw.ca/lampwords/

Scrabble and PDAs

Scrabble players are increasingly turning to small handheld devices (PDAs = personal digital assistants) for a convenient resource. Although PDAs are primarily sold as devices for managing personal information like an address book or a calendar, I now see many of my friends buying a contraption for the Scrabble features alone. These devices are like a small computer and can have software and data loaded into them. Just as desktop computers can have different operating systems (eg Microsoft, Macintosh), so too can PDAs. The two major platforms for PDAs are Pocket PC (PPC) and Palm. I prefer the Palm platform and know very little about PPC on PDAs.

Even the cheapest Palm device (eg the Palm Zire Z22) is more than adequate to do all the basics for Scrabble nuts. The only reasons for getting a more expensive model are : larger more readable screen display or (2) easier input eg keyboard or input panel always available or (3) expandability via eg SD cards (for eg storing photos and music).