King's Letter Swap

[rahnnyboy]

Anyone out there master this game yet?
It seems easy, just spacial reasoning with a small amount of word knowledge.
I'm not quite that good yet (only played 5 games with a high score around 4500).
Looking for any game-changer type tips, as I see the top scores are in the 10,000 range. Also, this looks like a really easily solved game via programming...so any opinions on the current top players?

[thice]

richmcd has an extensive Letter Swap guide in his blog at king. Maybe you want to have a look at it.

[rahnnyboy]

anyone here know how long it would take to go through a simple recursive code to generate, hold, and delete 1 trillion 20 character strings? if the answer is less than 2 minutes, I think this game is too cheatable and recommend people not play.

edit:
I realize that most of the word games are cheatable, probably none more so than Keyword. So I guess we should just rely on King's system to find the cheats...as usual...but I would hazard that programs are coming.
Even SC had a program written (obviously it would be harder to write one that actually optimizes score, but we did see it...recall thinkr).

[Jacob]

Rahn, is there a word game you'd be able to design that isn't cheatable?

[rahnnyboy]

Rahn, is there a word game you'd be able to design that isn't cheatable?

wordlink progressives are pretty uncheatable, and wordlink proper is close.

Programmers shortcomings:
1) Iterative simulation for optimized solutions
2) Input methods

Key things to exploit those shortcomings:
1) Board cannot be static - Keyword/Letter Swap are, Wordlink, Scrabble cubes, Bookworm are not.
2) Board cannot be screen readable - only Scrabble Cubes is not (easily) readable. However, if the websites bot detection is good, this is no longer an issue.
3) Scoring and strategy need to be complex - Keyword is somewhat strategic, Wordlink is extremely strategic, Letter Swap seemingly is complex. Probability based decision making is key to favoring the player.
4) Add in wildcards that are activated by the player (like lifelines in Millionaire). Again, to increase the complexity of the program needed to optimize.
5) The concept of speed. I put this up for scrabble cubes before - give a bonus timer on each word, not the round. Recall that word game on the SkillJam? Basically boggle with a mouse and a bonus for each word based on time between inputs. If you made that board non-static, and assume that anti-bot software will detect bot-based mouse clicks and screen reading, then a bot will never beat a human expert.
6) If you have an unknown, unqualified "elite" player surface, test them. Observe them. Webcam, hypercam, whatever.


Its hard. The best solution is what I do for scrabble....play in real life over the board! I really think if WW was serious about the W3G thing, they would fly all the semifinalists to a central location to play live.