Wacky History of Computer Scrabble

Yes, it is possible.

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Footnotes:
Scrabble was preceded by Butts' other game, Lexiko, which did not have a board. Scrabble was previously called "Criss-Cross Words" and "It" before that. The game was renamed to "Scrabble" by entrepreneur James Brunot, who also rearranged the premium squares on the board and simplified the rules to sell the game.
Monty Plays Scrabble had a sequel "Master Monty" (US Release 1987) with a larger lexicon and a more "difficult" tier (five tiers instead of four).
Official English Scrabble currently uses one of two dictionaries: the NASPA Word List with 196,601 words and the Collins Scrabble Words with 280,887 as of 2024. The official dictionary used in the US at the time of Monty was the OSPD1, though I could not find how many words it contained.
Turcan's Computer Scrabble was published by Leisure Genius. The edition for the ZX Spectrum was developed by Psion, with the fake words bug quickly patched in a second version.
A trie is a distinct data structure from a "tree". Computer scientists sometimes pronounce trie as "try" to make this distinction. It was originally defined mathematically by Alex Thue in 1912 and in the context of computer science by René de la Briandais in 1959.
The idea of storing potential letters on the board was shared by Peter Weinberger of AT&T Bell Laboratories, who had made his own Scrabble move-generator (94,000 words, 1 to 2 minutes a turn), in private communication with Appel and Jacobson.
Maven ended up using the dawg due to its smaller size and therefore quicker download speed, whereas Quackle uses the GADDAG for its faster move generation. Either is considered acceptable by the general community due to word generation not being a bottleneck in modern Scrabble bots.
The Monte Carlo Method was originally suggested by Stanislaw Ulam to John von Neumann for the simulation of neutron diffusion in nuclear fission after the invention of the first electronic computer: The ENIAC, another US government wartime project.
One significant difference between Maven and Quackle is Quackle's use of "superleaves": a pre-computed database of values for every single possible combination of 1-6 remaining rack tiles.
The deterministic search in the Quackle endgame is the B* search which is a type of "best-first search", though modern algorithms may opt for exhaustive searching, such as a program by the company Ortograf (according to Del Solar, 2022) and Macondo (Del Solar, 2023).
AlphaGo is bot by Google DeepMind that plays the boardgame Go, defeating reigning Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016. DeepMind also made DeepNash, which is a bot that plays Stratego, a boardgame involving imperfect information, a broad possibility space, and strategies involving bluffs. DeepNash uses the game theory concept of achieving Nash equilibrium rather than something like Monte Carlo, and reached a top-three ranking on the Stratego platform Gravon.
Macondo is a new Scrabble bot currently still in beta that also uses Monte Carlo Methods but aims to be better than Quackle, started in 2017 by César Del Solar, who also founded the online Scrabble community Woogles.
Elise is a Scrabble bot released in 2013 with a more sophisticated move evaluation similar to that of chess engines. Compared to the Quackle 0.97 Champion Player, it was measured to win just over 60% of games in 10-20% less time per move (Street, 2013). Thank you Alex Dings for this detail.

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See the code for the ending, open-source on GitHub: https://github.com/kevinjycui/Scrapple

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Further Reading:
"Breaking The Game" by Kenji Matsumoto: http://www.breakingthegame.net/
César Del Solar on Medium:   / scrabble-is-nowhere-close-to-a-solved-game  
ELBBARCS.COM by Francis Desjardins (Ortograf Inc.): https://www.elbbarcs.com/

References: https://junferno.com/references/#list-6

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Thank you Red Slendy for providing stylised English CC!

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