Superhuman Scrabble player even better than AI

[Juan]

I didn’t know there was even a Scrabble tournament, this guy even surpassed AI highest difficulty. The guy even competed on languages that he doesn’t speak and still won. Is it just a memory word game? Photograph memory? 

 

[trenton]

When you say "surpassed on the highest difficulty" do you mean that given an identical position, he played a move that was superior?

The problem with this framing is that Scrabble is a game in which it is possible to lose with perfect play. Luck matters a lot and strategy can only mitigate it so much. From that perspective, I would imagine that the AI played the statistically optimal move but still lost.

One advantage a human might have over an AI is reading the opponent's hand. For example, if an opponent played one move even though having a vowel would have allowed a clearly better move, then you can intuit that your opponent does not have those tiles while the AI would treat it as technically a statistical possibility.

This would open a door for a human to outplay an AI in a game of imperfect information, which happens regularly in other games as well as in the case of Alpha Star.