| Current mood: |  geeky |
| Current music: | Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker |
| Entry tags: | scrabble, zyzzyva |
Zyzzyva as Word Judge at the USSO
It looks like Zyzzyva has been chosen as the word judge program to be used at this year's U.S. SCRABBLE® Open. Can I just say that's freaking awesome? I started writing Zyzzyva early last year as a study program I could use on Linux, and it's grown a lot since then, especially since I announced its presence on CGP this past January. I owe a lot to the many people who have made great suggestions for improving it. It wouldn't be what it is today without all the help I've received, and I look forward to making it even better.
It was pretty strange to be using my own program in a tournament setting in Seattle. Especially when Zyzzyva upheld my opponents' challenges, grumble grumble... I can only imagine it's going to be ten times stranger to have Zyzzyva used by a room full of about 700 people over the course of four days. That's one thing I really love, for people to be using my software. I don't really care about getting money for it, or anything like that. I just like my software to be useful to people. And what a venue for it to be used!
There's always that part of me that thinks something horrible is going to happen. Somehow, even with all the troubleshooting and testing I've done to create the most stable release I possibly can, something is going to break. There's going to be some critical bug no one has seen before, and none of the Zyzzyva installations will work. The room will be filled with players yelling "Challenge!" for the human word judges, and it will be like dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. I know that this is really unlikely to happen, but I've learned that with computers anything is possible. I sure hope it doesn't.
Well, that was a depressing paragraph. Ignore that, everything is going to be wonderful!
On an unrelated note, I came so close to getting 100% on the JumbleTime 5s today...
With about 70 seconds left(!), I only needed to get FIKSU, AAILN, and EINPR. I had gotten REPIN earlier, and it took me just a few seconds to get RIPEN. I stared at FIKSU for about 20 seconds until I got KUFIS. Another five seconds and I got LIANA, but the final 30-40 seconds simply drained away as I tried guessing every combination that seemed reasonable. Somehow I forgot LANAI. Gaaahhh! I suppose I had time to cheat, but that would have been... well, cheating. And randomly typing in guesses is... uh, not cheating, sort of.
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saganist) wrote,
