Cheating at Scrabble

My wife has been playing Scrabble on her computer a lot lately, and she convinced me to play as well. It’s got something like seven or eight levels of difficulty, from “Moron” to “Channeling Noah Webster” or whatever it’s called.

It was easy to beat the computer at the lower levels, but — seeing as I’m not the brightest light in the night sky — the middle levels actually provided a challenge.

Just for fun, I tried beating the machine at the “Genius” level. I was getting creamed (it was playing words like “xyzprq”) when my eyes drifted to the built-in dictionary. I could type in whatever I wanted to before playing the tiles.

No, no, I thought, that would be cheating. If I was gonna win, I was gonna win fair and square.

But then it hit me: The computer was cheating. By definition.

The computer has access to the entire Scrabble dictionary. It can never forget a word, and it can never play a word that doesn’t exist. Like most humans my vocabulary was limited, but the computer was under no such restraint.

I had to guess. Computers don’t guess. They know.

So I hit the dictionary with abandon, trying to at least even the playing field against an opponent with a photographic memory who had just finished reading the dictionary.

I lost, of course, but I know the PC can take no satisfaction. It cheated.