So you might think that you're good with words and good at Scrabble, but can you beat a robot?
I'm gonna try right now and play a Scrabble robot.
And I am joined with a little bit of help by Will Anderson, North American Scrabble champion.
We're gonna do this, we're gonna beat this robot.
What do you say, Will?
I think we can do it, let's do it.
Okay, I have some confidence here.
Okay, so what this is doing Let's start off you think of a strategy as our first word I want to explain a little bit about the robot as well.
So this is using image technology it's basically how to work out what letters you're putting down and the best combination and the maximum letters and numbers that we can get from the robot point of view that's what its doing but we have to use our brains.
Okay, let's think about first word.
What are we gonna put down?
We have seven letters.
Right, we've got some high letters here.
And we go to try to put those on the good squares on the board, like the double letter score.
I think we have a couple options that I see to do it.
We can just play fatty, or we could play.
We could play trait as well, but let's just go with the normal word that I think we all know.
Fattie.
Yeah, I think we wanna played, I actually played non-fat against the robot in my first game.
So it sticks with the theme.
Nice, sticking with the theme.
Okay, fattie, I like this one.
All right, let's see, let's see.
Okay so now we've got our word down on the board, we've played our word, we're gonna go to the tablet over here, press Finished.
All right, now we've submitted our word-
The new word is fatty-
It says the new word is fatty, 30 points!
Well done, well done.
All right, now the robot is gonna start putting down some tiles.
Typically you can't see the letters your opponent has, in this game you can, but it's honor system.
It's a little, it's treat a little bit us out of seeing it.
But I noticed, look at some high score numbers in there.
There's a q in there, there's a b, this is, and there's a c as well, this is looking good for the robot.
My.
Okay, what do you think it's gonna play?
It's gonna play, probably, Q-A-T, qat.
Qat is always the one, when every time I play it-
[CROSSTALK] word, yeah, if you play Scrabble long enough, you see that wordover and over again.
And here it comes.
Here we go, qat!
This is bringing me back to my days of Words With Friends.
This was the high score, this was the one that everyone would be like, what is this word?
It is qat q a t nicely done let's get some more let's get some more letters for us we've got to get some more, well lets, yeah steal some from the robot let's do this.
One more one more okay so I see we could do something like we could do we've got some I;m just looking at some words we can do her No, [INAUDIBLE], I want to use that Y or the F. I wish we had an N, [SOUND] Y. We could do something with the Y.
Well, I mean we don't have a U.
It's hard to do something with a Q without a U.
Q is gonna be really tough to use.
So yeah, I'm definitely looking at the Y, the F's, one of those nice Okay.
I said let's do something on the Y.
We can't wait forever.
Let's just play something like.
Let's play something like.
I'm going to just do.
Okay, go ahead.
Look at the Y. The pressure's on.
No, I thought we had a different.
Yeah, okay, here we go.
Time is up.
No, no, I'm here, I'm here.
I've got it, I got it, I got it.
Yeah, I got it, I got it.
No, it's resetting.
I took too long.
Is that standard rules?
Is that standard?
No, it's not.
I mean typically you have a little more time.
But the robot is very fast.
So it holds you to a very high standard, I guess.
My goodness, my gosh.
Okay, so what's happening is when you actually do and complete the game what it does is the robot it gives you a little pencil sharpener gifts that is, see he says keep your mind sharp with the pencil sharpener, I love it.
It's so much fun playing it.
But, hey, I don't think that's a -, that's not a rule the time limit.
Hey, you cheating robot, you're cheating.
I think-
Maybe with a little more time?
Yeah, I think next time.
Okay, so we gonna reset the robot because I know you're gonna challenge it next.
That's right, I am.
I want to talk a little bit about like strategy when you play a robot.
How do you have to kind of- Think in a different way, if you're playing a human.
Well, the first thing is that the robot knows the entire dictionary-
[LAUGH]
Perfectly.
It takes human beings years to get to anywhere close to that point.
So that's thing number one, where it has an advantage over 99.9% of human beings and then obviously it plays really fast.
It knows what word it's going to play instantly so if you dally at all
Yup that's it
Typically in a tournament you get 25 minutes to allocate however you want.
I see.
I think in this game we had like a minute and half or something per turn.
I don't even know what it was.
Well good luck in your challenge with the robot I;m so excited to see what you do.
Thanks so much for watching guys we're gonna throw it to a break but stay tuned we've got heaps more CES coverage coming up really really soon live from CNET.
