WordChess — Food for Thought

5 short essays on the ideas behind the game. Each one stands on its own.

• How a computer picks a wordBefore the AI plays, it must find its move inside a haystack of a hundred and fifty thousand words, and then stop looking.
• Teaching a machine 149,000 words, in 22 languagesA word game needs more than a list of legal strings. It needs to say what each one means, and meaning is the hardest thing to store.
• The Game With No Bad DrawsTake the bag away from a word game and something disappears with it, the alibi, the miracle, and the whole drama of luck.
• The Mathematics of a LetterQ is worth ten points and E is worth one. That single fact hides a small theory of language, an argument about information, and a reason the game's tile bag looks different in Spanish than in English.
• A Combinatorial OceanChess is our benchmark for depth. A quiet design choice makes WordChess deeper still.