Scrabble Cats

SCRABBLE CATS™️ LOGO

P=NP

We originally tried to make a machine learning powered general theorem prover in LEAN to solve P=NP. Unfortunately this didn't work because nobody knew LEAN So we took inspiration from our name - SCRABBLE CATS™️

Meowlang

We thought of making a Scrabble bot in an esoteric language called Meowlang where everything is made of "meows" Unfortunately because of how Meowlang works we would've had to encode every valid Scrabble word into a series of "Meows" which we estimated would take about 140MB alone

Scrabble Cats!

Our final idea was a game where the user plays against a scrabble bot: the bot always plays optimally, but is restricted to only using cat-related words. We wanted it to be clever enough to still beat the user.

How we built it

We built the bot in Python, with a brute-force search algorithm over all possible Scrabble moves, given the current state of the board.

Challenges we ran into

Several! Scrabble moves aren't always in an unbroken line (they can be interrupted by existing tiles), the word formed may only be partly filled by the bot's available tiles, the tiles deployed can create or combine other words in nuanced ways that must be verified to ensure everything is legal, and one of our members had a brain melt trying to write a simple binary search.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We finished the back end, which is capable not only of selecting the best cat-related scrabble move, but is powerful enough to efficiently find the best move over all valid words. We are also proud of our interface design, which features many cats.

The Future of Scrabble Cats™️?

This is hardly the end of SCRABBLE CATS™️. If we can get a SCRABBLE CATS™️ branded board with Cat shaped tiles manifested into reality, we can use a Robot Arm to deploy the bot's moves, thus allowing people to play Scrabble Cats™️ with physical tiles.