Time to retire

After a rich and illustrious career, these two JoL's are finally retiring.  Thanks to KP, PP, EM, and LB for guessing whose is who's.  PP and LB had it right: Christine's is the classical and mine was the emoticon.

Bon voyage, my friends.

Monster 635 Scrabble Game

I had an amazing game of scrabble at our Calgary Spring Tournament recently, and scored 635!  I was playing my friend Randall, one of the top rated at our club.  To get 600+, you often need some free turns due to your opponent challenging or exchanging.  But neither happened, to Randall's credit he recognized all of them.  Sometimes, it's not even the letters you get (I only had one blank, one S, Z, Q), but the synergy between them and the right openings on the board that count.  I played 6 bingos in all.  Final score 635-275.

 

Studing Fatties

Certain words have many anagrams and it can be hard to remember what all of them are. Here are some visualizations I produced using GraphViz, to aid in this task:

Blue Rodeo

Just got back from Calgary Folkfest with Christine - we had an amazing time and were lucky to see Blue Rodeo again. We've seen them together 4 times now.

I remember Vik used to bring home Blue Rodeo CD's from the library all the time, and was always playing them. I couldn't stand it much at first, with all the strange instruments and long guitar solos. Five days in May is one of my favorites now and I love listening to the inspired solos.

As Christine said tonight, just when you think they're playing your favorite song, you hear the next one and that's your favorite too.

After all these years, they still impress. What a fabulous show.

Juraj

Art + Scrabble

I've seen a lot of Tag Clouds on the web. They are a short visual summary of the contents of page, where font size, color, etc are used to convey things like importance.

I thought it might be interesting after creating a list of bingos I played in our recent Scrabble tournament. I won the top division and won the prize for most bingos, 30 in 14 games. I looked at the study sheet I made here:

30 Bingo Study Sheet

and thought about combining the idea with tag clouds.

I created a handful of study pages here, in that style. "Anagram Clouds"

Reno, incredible scrabble game

There's photos in the article I posted on the recent Reno WGPO scrabble tournament. Checkout the game with 8 bingos out of 9 turns by Jerry Lerman.

http://www.calgary374.org/NewsArticlePage.php?id=436

Randomness in Art

An interesting discussion about 'random art'. My favorite was the 4 9x9 panels of random colors - can you spot the fake?

http://tinyurl.com/4nuvoma

Tiling #4

Looks more like bricks if the edges are roughed up.

Tiling #3

It looks kind of stupid if the dominoes aren't connected. That's better.

Tiling #2

Random Domino Tiling

A random domino tiling of a checkerboard.

Carcassonne 84

Here was a map Christine and I built by hand back in January 2010. It uses 72 basic tiles + 12 river tiles. The perimeter is all farmland.

variations on a theme

there, this is my favorite.

Synthetic Art

I was curious about creating some synthetic art. I like patterns that vary only a few parameters in a design ... it might have been inspired by some mugs I recently saw. This pattern varies only 4 shades of brown and 4 shades of blue and draws little washers.

Tada!

I'd like to dig up my old image processing code and try some more advanced concepts, like trying some abstract filters on photographs. I really liked Vik's recent images of Christmas lights and other lights way out of focus in the background.

Carcassonne 198

We've accumulated many expansions, and are now up to 198 tiles. I used my software for creating tilings for Eternity II to put together a 18x11 map of all 198 tiles. There are an odd number of farm edges and road edges, so the perimeter has all farm except for one road.



Pierre, how many tiles are you up to?

Happy new year to all,
Juraj

6-6 in Calgary Scrabble Marathon

I just played in the "Calgary Marathon", a 12 round scrabble tournament all in one day. Here are some of the highlights from my games

Results at our Calgary Scrabble Club website.

Greed Kills

With a rack of CDEIIL?, after Wayne's bingo of HINDERS, I greedily tried CHILLIED through the H, as a triple triple. He challenged it off. My regret was I had two playable bingos through the I. Can you guess what they are?

Opening Dilemma

I was holding ADEIPTU. I wasn't sure what to do, whether to play UPDATE, keeping I, for 24 pts or play PIU, leaving a much more potent ADET, for only 10 pts. Turns out taking the points was better and I made the right choice.

Missed Bingos

Holding DEEFIT?, I missed two easy bingos. Holding CCEILO?, I missed two bingos as well. These are obscure however, COELIAC, or ECBOLIC. I had just studied ECBOLIC a few days before, and would have found it for sure if I didn't have a blank. But it was too new for me to recall.

Brilliant Opponents

My friend Eric, mentioned in previous posts, (where I played out to an I with PARCHESI last time) played phenomenally. He won the tournament with 11/12, which is a nearly impossible record in scrabble. But against me he had a great move. The board was very locked up but some dangerous letters were out. I was holding ? + NG + some other good letters and the one bingo line I was eyeing was through TI. I was threatening the nine REMIT(TI)NG. He correctly blocked that line, making TIL and dashing my hopes. Any lesser player would have just scored for points, and then ended up losing after I bingoed out. I did have a nice play after though, extending CELEB to (CELEB)RATING, an eleven, which is extremely rare to see. Was worth 48 pts when I hit a triple. Lost by 17 to Eric and by 14 to Shannon, who finished 2nd.

Odd Verbs

I remembered that SQUID was a verb, to fish for squid. It came in handy when, down by 20 points in an ending, holding 6 tiles, two of which were low scoring blanks, and an opponent that would easily go out next turn. I extended SQUID to SQUIDDED, using my blanks for a pair of D's, hitting a triple word score and getting 48 pts. That sealed my win. Blanks are normally super valuable, but late in the game, if you can't bingo with them, they can sometimes keep you from scoring.

Unwinnable

Some games you just can't win. I bingoed three times with SCHEMER, MATELOT, and RETAPING, but my opponents' SP(R)AYING, triple triple scoring 203 dwarfed my whole effort. Excellent win by Wendy, 567-373.

ANSWERS

1. CDEIIIL? = FILICIDE, SILICIDE
2. DEEFIT? = FILETED, FEINTED

14x14 Framed Puzzle solved

I finally achieved a major milestone with Eternity II, solving a framed 14x14 puzzle. I had it running on Christine's machine, and it took about 8 hours.

(Here's an online EII you can try, just to see what it is
http://uk.eternityii.com/try-eternity2-online/)

A framed puzzle is one that uses the EII pieces and is bordered by grey edges, just like the real puzzle. To date, the best solvers have been able to get this, but no one has reported success in anything bigger.

Unfortunately, a 14x14 cannot be used to get a 16x16 solution, but it does give you insight into the larger version.

Juraj

Western Canadian Scrabble Ch

I just played in the Western Canadian Scrabble Championship. It was 37 rounds of scrabble of 5 days, the longest tournament in North America. I played in three separate tournaments of 8, 8 and 21 rounds. I played ok but finished somewhat below my expectation.

My highlight was coming back from being down 169 pts against my friend, and one of the highest rated at our event, Eric. I scored 81 for LATEX (with a 9x X) and then had to bingo out with ACEHPRS and my word had to be 8 letters and end with and I, that was on the board. I plunked down PARCHESI, and was still behind by 2 but then won after adding the 18 points for his rack of Y, blank, and 5 vowels. Was an incredibly lucky finish.

Excellent tournament, but I'm exhausted and need some rest. Not to mention dishes, laundry, etc etc.

I lost one game by a point, and my three highest losses were from 459, 450 and 435.
Geez, what do you need to get to win in the top division???

Juraj

Sea of Yellow

Barke and I had a wonderful time at Jean's, was sure nice of her to let me bring him over and nice of Laverne to drive us. I felt bad that he's home alone all day during the week and didn't want to leave him again on Sat. Jean used to have a German Shepherd and Barke kind of reminds her of him. I ended up winning the day, including playing RA(TI)ONING, a nice 9. In my last round, I bingoed with WANTONER, got a challenge, bingoed again with PRIVATE and then picked up 26 points from the letters on my opponent's rack. Nice way to pull ahead by an extra 200 points.

Made some huge inroads into EII, I've always wanted to do a beam stack search with 100,000 nodes. In english, it means having the computer look at the most promising 100,000 positions before going forward to look at the next ones. In heuristic search, it's common to just look at one idea at a time. With this approach in EII, if you make one bad move early on, you'd have no chance to find the solution. This puts the eggs into 100,000 baskets instead of 1. With a search space of 10^45 and my ability to look at 10^5 at a time, I'm still not holding my breath for the $2 million prize. But with a litmus test of a beam size of 20,000 I was able to find better answers than I have to date. It took it 1 day to run. Now that I have a larger width, 200,000 actually, it should about 10 times as long, so in a week or two I'll see how much farther, if any, it was able to get.

I was able to place 211 / 256 pieces before it determined it would be unsolvable. Not great, but that means all but basically three lines were done.

I could score much higher if I was just counting the matching edges out of 480. But I'm trying to get a full solution, not just a high score for a partial solution.

Fall in Calgary

I hope to post some photos soon!

I had a great walk with Barke down to Kensington tonight. I was going to go to a Schawarma place for dinner but it was too busy and I'd have had no where to sit. So I retraced my steps 3 blocks and ended up on the OJ's patio. Had a great steak sand, two beers, and tied Barke up outside. He snarled at two dogs that went by, he always has that issue when tied up. But otherwise, he made at least 10 new people friends. Everyone always loves him.

Was nice to relax and enjoy one of our last summer evenings, if you can call them that. I had my netbook and did some anagramming. We have our Western Canadian tournament coming up, and it's about 5 days of Scrabble. I've now got three modes for studying words

New Words
Review
Tournament Prep

The new words are just that, new words based on my own priority system. The review is a randomized selection of words that are due to be studied again. The randomization is important so you don't feel you're doing the same ones over and over. And the tournament prep focuses only on the important words I need to know, that are due for review. After years of studying, this seems to be the best breakdown. I'll focus on tournament prep for the WCSC.

I've been obsessing too much about Eternity II lately, but really loving it. Have some new ideas to try out tonight. It's been nice talking to fellow enthusiasts on the yahoo newsgroup lately.

Christine is out in New York, and I've been making the most of my free time - Reading Simple Chess, doing excellent daily and weekly chess problems at shredder.com and lots of work at EII
Not to mention lots of scrabble study still.

Here's a daily puzzle sample

Juraj