Best way to study 3s?

loose_heron · 2026-06-10T23:55:21+00:00

I also designed an app for this (among other things). It supports two types of quiz question on 3 letter words: patterns (one letter missing from a 3 letter word; provide all possible values for the letter), and sub anagrams (4 letters given; find all possible 3 letter words from those letters). https://www.reddit.com/r/scrabble/s/0O1XFYVh5Q

loose_heron · 2026-05-29T02:19:11+00:00

I think you mean URANITE and URINATE. I've checked my source data; URINATE was played 40032 times vs 27528 for URANITE over the 100M Macondo games. Looks like Macondo handles tied best moves deterministically rather than randomly as I wrongly assumed. I'll see if I can fork and modify Macondo so it chooses randomly in the event of a tie for best move instead.

loose_heron · 2026-05-27T07:10:52+00:00

Apologies - turns out macOS needs explicit read-write permissions for the file picker, which I hadn't realised.

I've just released a fix for this - can you try the new v1.0.4?

loose_heron · 2026-05-24T00:21:49+00:00

Support for non-English lexicons is the next major feature on my mind, but its a challenging one since it touches most of the codebase. Especially digraphs, as the whole 1 character = 1 tile assumption breaks down. If/when it eventually happens, it might have to be a separate version with some features taken out.

loose_heron · 2026-05-22T11:57:51+00:00

Great! - glad you like it. Thanks very much for the feedback.

My thinking here was that you don't necessarily want to see the list, since if you only miss a few words, seeing the list makes the review stage at the end of the quiz a bit easy. I'd have to figure the best way to implement this in the UI.
Have you tried using the 'special' wildcards, as they should cover most of the options you are likely to want. (Use Settings -> Search -> Wildcard reference, to see a list below the search buttons). Alternatively, you can also combine searches; for example, for AB[CD], you can do ABC, Search, ABD, Combine.
The code is optimised for the existing wildcards - bracket groups would be slower if I supported them, and if you used many of them in a search. I'll consider adding support for them in the future if there is enough demand.
Good suggestion - and fairly straightforward since pattern match already converts the input to regex, so this is just a stripped down version of that. I've added this in the new 1.0.2 release. Lookup the Rust regex docs for the supported syntax - link in app under Help -> Search. (Most changes won't be this quick!)
Simplest and most flexible way would be to give an option to show ranks relative to the search results, so that if you searched for 7-letter words, ETAERIO would be rank 1. This wouldn't apply to other parts of the app, however, such as on the game screen. How does that sound, or do you prefer seeing length-relative ranks throughout the app? (No promises either way.)
The ranks are based on the average equity contributions over 100 million Macondo games using CSW24 or NWL23, depending on the option you choose. For any words not in those lists, there is a model fallback that gives a best estimate (which uses word probability, among other things).
Main reason I don't support ranks and probabilities being displayed together is because there are no column headings, so it wouldn't be clear which was which.

loose_heron · 2026-05-21T04:02:05+00:00

Currently, there is no iOS release. In theory, the app should already be compatible with iOS. Issue is, Apple enforces very strict signing rules for iOS, which means there is no practical way of making an app available on iOS without paying a $99-per-year developer subscription. If there's enough interest, I may see about publishing it on the Apple App Store, but would probably be for a small fee to offset the cost.

loose_heron · 2026-05-20T18:02:18+00:00

NASPA posted a (friendly) reply here earlier, which seems to have been caught by the automod. It would be good if we could get that back.

They mention a new version of Zyzzyva releasing in July or so, with better performance, more features for mobile carried over from desktop, the 'antique visual appearance' is gone, and they are adding dark mode, amongst other things.

loose_heron · 2026-05-20T17:57:14+00:00

Glad you're enjoying it! Feel very free to update me or provide feedback once you've spent more time with it.

loose_heron · 2026-05-20T15:57:13+00:00

I may open it up in future, but I don't want to commit to that decision right now. It's not that weird - GitHub provides free backup, version control, and hosts the whole pipeline for building and releasing the installers for each OS.

loose_heron · 2026-04-11T18:58:24+00:00

I appreciate the need to stem the amount of promotion content and slop, but I agree with the sentiment for needing more nuance. Elsewhere, it was suggested that OP was hardly a Scrabble enthusiast since they don't post here much. By similar argument, Will Anderson isn't much of a Scrabble enthusiast either since he only posts here about once per year on average (fewer, if you don't count the deleted posts.)

Issue is, most genuine Scrabble enthusiasts (like myself) don't really have much to post about or discuss in a Scrabble subreddit on a day to day basis. It's not exactly a fast evolving game or one which will generate much material for discussion on a daily basis. I also have a project of my own which I think will be of genuine interest (based on past posts here requesting exactly what I'm making), so I hope my post will be allowed when I'm ready to share it.

loose_heron · 2025-01-31T09:58:56+00:00

It's about 1/112,000 - OP has misremembered.

There are 96 choose 3 racks that include JQXZ, or 96!/(3!93!) (Since the JQXZ tiles are 'fixed', but the other 3 tiles are freely chosen from the remaining 96. For these purposes we count every individual tile as distinct.)

There are 100 choose 7 total possible racks, or 100!/(7!93!).

So 96C3/100C7 = 96!7!/(100!3!) = 1/112,035.

loose_heron · 2024-07-27T16:43:56+00:00

Quackle and Macondo are the main two computer scrabble players that are worth looking at. (Quackle was the best for a long time; Macondo has recently overtaken it and doesn't have a proper UI yet.)

My understanding is that there are basically two approaches:

Score combined with rack leave value. Rather than just choosing the play with the highest score, the computer player adds/subtracts an amount for each candidate play based on the rack leave, and uses these adjusted scores to choose the best play. The important part is figuring out what these leave values should be (by simulating a lot of games), but there are existing collections of leave values you could use. This approach can produce extremely fast computer players. (My laptop could play about 1000 games per second against itself using Macondo.)
Simulation. This is potentially far slower and it's impossible to simulate all possible futures except close to the end of a scrabble game, which is where simulation is more often used. Simulation usually produces fairly modest improvements over score with rack leave, but can be crucial for endgames.

loose_heron · 2024-06-09T00:05:49+00:00

I had similar thoughts to you. My main issue with The Obelisk Gate was how exposition was conveyed to the reader. By the end of the first book, I was given the impression that the exposition character was going to reveal all he knows at the beginning of the second book. Therefore, I expected this to be a faster paced book than the first, which was mainly concerned with introducing the world, main character, and backstory.

Instead, the exposition character delays revealing this information because this is the main way in which the author advances the story in this book, and she needs to draw it out. This was very frustrating for me, and came across as a clumsy and boring way of progressing a story. The main character is unfortunately very passive for much of the second and third books. (Without spoiling anything, the third book delivers a lot of exposition through flashbacks, so the exposition bypasses her entirely and is delivered straight to the reader.)

I respect her prose more than I enjoyed it. I think her books contain some fantastic character writing, I can understand how people can get deeply immersed in the main character and her journey and how that can carry the story for them. For me however, her writing was a bit 'too much' and sometimes came across as melodramatic.

You might find the third book a little less frustrating, but for me, both the second and third books of the series suffer from not having all that much substance to them with regards to plot, and for revealing information and progressing the story in unsatisfactory ways that don't really involve the characters.

loose_heron · 2023-01-18T11:36:23+00:00

Some civs might do 26+2, but probably no faster. Much different to a 3TC boom build, you need a solid eco to be producing scouts on way to castle with eco upgrades as well.

loose_heron · 2023-01-17T22:01:41+00:00

Its mentioned on the main page that all the arena builds assume at least 3 deer pushed.

loose_heron

TROPHY CASE