Nigel Richards
Image: Kingoflettuce, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
2020-09
Nigel Richards (Scrabble player)
In 2015, despite not speaking French, Richards won the French World Scrabble Championships, after reportedly spending nine weeks studying the French dictionary. He won it again in 2018, and multiple duplicate titles from 2016.
Turns out at high levels scrabble is basically a combinatorics game where the mathematically-minded and good memorizers have the edge.
David Silver (an AI guru from DeepMind):
You might think Scrabble should be easy for computers because they can just memorize the dictionary. Well the first reason that isn’t the case is because the top human players also memorize the dictionary.
