biscrab is a tool for measuring the score potential of letter pairs in Scrabble.
The score potential of a pair (x,y) is defined as the sum of the base scores of all words that contain both x and y. If x and y are the same letter, then the words must contain at least two of the letter.
The corpus of words are accepted as standard input to biscrab.py. The default output is a serialized python dictionary of the weighted scores of each letter pair. The weight of the pair (x,y) is computed as (potential(x,y)-minimum)/(maximum-minimum), where minumum and maximum are the minumum and maximum score potentials of all pairs.
Pass in an "html" parameter to produce HTML output with Cheetah.
I was wondering whether I could improve my Scrabble strategy by first identifying the letters in my rack with the greatest potential to make high-scoring words. This could be done by considering all the pairs of letters, and picking the pairs that most frequently appear in high-scoring words. These pairs might help me quickly narrow down the best possible words in my rack.
egrep "^.{2,6}$" /usr/share/dict/words | python biscrab.py html > biscrab.html
In the HTML rendering, lighter colors are better pairs. The best pairs here are (e,r) and (a,e). I used words in /usr/share/dict/words between 2 and 6 letters as my corpus.
