Gadgetory

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 row but what do you say well we 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 about strategy as our first word I want to kind of explain a little bit about the robot as well so this is using image technology it's basically like kind of work out what letters you're putting down and the best combination and the maximum letters and numbers that we can kind of get from the robot point of view that's what it's doing but we have to use our brains okay let's think about first word what are we gonna put down we go seven letters right we've got some high point letters here and we got 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 traif as well but let's just go with the normal word that I think we all know and I think it's yeah I think we want to play I actually played non-fat against the robot in my first game nice you sticking with the theme okay Fatiha I like this one like this one alright let's see it lets see it okay so now we've got our word down on the board we played I would we're gonna go to the tablet over here press finished alright now I've submitted our word it says the new word is fatty 30 points well done well done alright now the robot is gonna stop putting down some tiles Oh see the letters your opponent has in this game you can but it's you know honor system it's cheating a little bit outside of you seeing it but I've noticed look at some high score numbers there there's a cue in there there's a B this is low and there's a C as well this is looking good for the robot oh my okay what do you think is gonna play it's gonna play probably qat cat Oh cat it's always the one win every time I play it if you play Scrabble long enough you'll see that word over and over again and here it comes here we go cat oh this is my bringing me back to my days of words with friends playing this this was the high score this is the one that everyone would be like what is this but it is cat qat nicely done all right let's get some more let's get some more letters from us we're gonna get some more Alex yeah let's just steal some from the robot let's do this one more one more oh okay so I see we could do something like we could do we've got some I'm just looking at some words we could be strategy it really is that Y or the F oh I wish we had an end we could do something with the Y I mean we don't have a year it's hard to do something with a Q without the year who's gonna be really tough to use so yeah I'm definitely looking at the Y the FS one of those nights I say let's do something on the way let's do something on the Y let's do let's do I'm gonna stay with the Y the pressures on oh no I thought we had a different let yeah okay baby go oh no I know I'm here I'm here I got it I got it I got it yeah I got it I got it no it's resetting I took too long that is that is that standard rules is that 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 oh my gosh okay so what's happening is when you actually do complete the game what it does is the robot it gives you a little pencil shopping a gift that is see he says keep your mind shop with a pencil sharpener I love it it's so much fun playing it but hey I didn't think that's a that's not a rule the time limit hey you cheating robot you're cheating I think next time okay so we're gonna reset the robot because I know you're gonna challenge it next but I want it I want to talk a little bit about like strategy when you play a robot like how do you have to kind of think in a different way too if you're playing a human well the first thing is that the robot knows the entire dictionary 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 you I mean that's you know typically in a tournament you get 25 minutes to allocate however you want I think in this game we had like a minute and a 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 to a break but stay tuned we've got heaps more CES coverage coming up really really soon live from CNET