Ntuple Indemnity

I am now officially torn.

Given that I’m missing this year’s Grant Davy’s in-house debate tournament because of the Western Canadian Scrabble Championships, I guess it’s only fair that I give up something Scrabble-related for debate. This looks to happen, as the Scott Petersen documentary Scrabylon is screening at the Calgary International Film Festival on Saturday, 27 September – and that’s when UADS is running the Lois Hole high school tournament.

If you are down in Calgary, please go see this film and tell me how it is. I just know I’m missing out here.

After six Orientation presentations, three days of classes, $700 of textbooks, an outdoor double feature of Desperado and The Matrix Reloaded and countless bowls of Kraft Dinner, it’s back to blogging.

Following up on this post, now the Franklin Electronics Scrabble Companion has seen release and wave after wave of criticism, the Scrabble community has pretty much spoken: it sucks. It’s full of misspellings, rife with omissions, questionable in its interface, and unsure whether it wants to be a product for competitive players or the living-room masses.

On the other hand, I saw and handled one of these myself a week or two ago, and I must admit that the exterior is very nice, even if the squarish form factor isn’t the most pocketable. It’s got the looks of a cool toy; pity the brains are a little addled.

However, in a laudable and impressive display of corporate responsibility – a most excellent deflection of the criticisms that Franklin is practicing consumerist extortion (and there were many) – it was announced Thursday that the product is going to be fixed and replacements will be issued free-of-charge. This was a particularly well-timed move since the device has yet to see the light of mass retail, and has insofar been available primarily to NSA players who sought it out online. (Contrast this with, say, the shameless public release of misframed Back to the Future DVDs last year, which was not fixed until much later, concerning which a good deal of the public remained uninformed.) It would have been a better strategy if they’d told the early adopters that they were effectively beta-testing the damn thing, but the fact that they are not knowingly unleashing a faulty product and letting it be.

In other news, my Palm V is once again functional, so it’s back to LAMPWords for me. Apparently there’s some joint development going on with Lexicus going on, so the main downside of the Palm software – no definitions – is well on the way to being rectified.

Taking home USD$50,000 and vaulting to the top of the Scrabble All-Time Money Winners List is the previously 1909-rated David Gibson, who defeated finalist Ron Tiekert in four games to win the 2003 All-Stars Championship in Providence. For complete coverage of this weekend’s event, including round-by-round commentary as well as turn-by-turn analyses of select matches, visit the NSA’s website.

Also note that an ESPN film crew was present at the tournament, and will broadcast it at a date to be announced. Apparently, they need a little extra time to censor out the naughty words first.

Now available for ordering at NSA Word Gear and Amazon is the Franklin Scrabble Companion, basically an electronic version of The Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary, Third Edition (OSPD3) that was published in the mid-1990s. Though it was before my time, the Franklin for the OSPD2 had a stellar reputation in its day for being the ultimate portable anagramming companion – cheap, pocket-sized, and feature-rich.

The new Franklin is of questionable utility, however. At 5″ on each side, it is a considerably larger model, only slightly smaller than a compact disc. It includes the one-line definitions of the OSPD3, but its use of that dictionary as a hard-wired word source is its greatest drawback. It is unsuitable for tournament play, as it omits the same 167 playable “offensive words” as the OSPD3, which are included in the actual tournament word source. Furthermore, word is that the next round of changes to the Tournament Word List is slated for as early as 2005.

As a product geared towards the casual living room player, the Franklin does show some promise. It eliminates the need to physically flip through the dictionary for challenges and definitions, even if this simultaneously removes one’s ability to scan the dictionary casually looking for neat words. In doing so, it removes the nuisance of the print version’s pseudo-alphabetical sorting and grouping of inflections. Whether or not this is worth $49.99 USD is a different question entirely. One has to wonder about the marketing strategy behind it: do people who don’t play at clubs and tournaments actually study words rigorously? Is there really a market for this? There might be – after all, some tournament gurus still lug an OSPD3 around for the definitions alone, and the book seems to sell rather well; as of this writing, its Amazon.com sales rank is a whopping 351.

But as far as electronic Scrabble aids go, the consensus among competitive players is that Paul Sidorsky’s freeware LAMPWords for Palm OS is far superior. Using a display that is not confined to one line, and filled with LeXpert-esque lookup and list creation features, the only overhead is that you need a Palm device to run it, and the only drawback is the lack of definitions. But LAMPWords is most prominently superior because of its versatility, in using downloadable software-based dictionary files. It’s adaptable to future revisions and lexica used outside North America (I refer specifically to SOWPODS here), and any errors are easily patched.

There is a sizable controversy on CGP right now concerning the latest revision of Merriam Webster, one of the primary sources used by the NSA’s Dictionary Committee. The discussion was primarily sparked by the Eleventh Edition’s redefinition of “CPU” as a lowercase noun rather than an uppercase acronym, which would imply that it is fair game for inclusion in the next edition of the Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary.

The main argument in favour of CPU’s inclusion – other than a rejection of all common sense, that is – is that it would be a double standard to not include it, yet allow words of clearly acronymic origin (LASER, SCUBA, MODEM), still in acronymic form (EMF, AMU) and questionable legitimacy (QWERTY). However, consider the following: a) “laser” and “scuba” have come into common lowercase usage as words of their own; b) “emf” and “amu” are by scientific convention, never spelt as all-uppercase acronyms, whereas I have yet to see one reputable technical source that uses CPU in the same manner; and c) QWERTY is pretty darn questionable in the first place, even though with an S tacked on the end, it makes the second-coolest bingo in the game (ZLOTYCH will always be dearer to my heart).

In summary: English is a weird language.