ChatGPT Reinvented Scrabble...

Large language models like ChatGPT and Google Bard have burst onto the scene, already outperforming human beings at a wide variety of tasks.
So I had ChatGPT and Bard play each other in Scrabble to see what the future of the game might look like. And let me tell you, the future is...weird.
For more Scrabble content from me, follow my Twitch channel:
/ wanderer15
I also have a weekly show on the official Scrabble Twitch channel (Tuesdays 3-5 PM ET)
/ scrabble
Play Scrabble at playscrabble.com!

[@morrisgreenberg5223]

I think the biggest strategic takeaway here that I am going to adopt into my game is declaring victory when I feel it is appropriate. This type of conviction has been severely lacking in my game recently, and I think it could really help me win some nail biters

[@BrettMKW]

You should take it a step further. After declaring victory, keep convincing your opponents they do indeed have legal moves. After one game you should have roughly 4 wins on the leaderboard!

[@Ascension721]

This is fantastic

[@somewhereupthere785]

stop, im dying

[@quentinvermotdesroches372]

The fact that QI was still played in that game actuelly is incredible

[@vitex198]

Even the AIs know that QI is the best word lol

[@ajaxmajor]

i can't believe chat gpt missed FHQWHAGADS through the ce of AGENT at the end, that would've scored 335 points

[@literally_why8999]

jan misali reference?

[@SAYFVCKFOR100DOLLARS]

come on FHQWHGADS

[@ShishuHiwatari]

should gotten help from his friends joe and jake

[@logamuffin3876]

@@literally_why8999 no, fhqwhgads is from homestar runner lol

[@IntangirVoluntaryist]

​@@logamuffin3876 strong bad

[@muhammadmousa4192]

Your delivery of this was perfect lmaooo

[@vidhyasaivishruth]

Wow. I now realize that me memorizing bingoes was pointless. I should really learn to declare abrupt victory, it'll help me a lot! Thanks for the advice Will.

[@puzzLEGO]

Of all made-up words, my personal favourite was the two letter beauty “pp”, with damply and heliotrope

[@Fhwgads11]

No that’s a real word. It is slang for the male genitalia. Alternatively, it is the unit of measurement for how many more times a Pokemon can use a specific move. I hope this helps you in your next game of scrabble :) feel free to reference this comment if any of your opponents protest

[@Ascension721]

This is fantastic! Genius moves in this game, such as replacing an a with an s and playing stonier, the genius tbeachum, and the magnificent idea of breaking free of the confines of the board. I believe this to be a metaphor of society. Do not ask any further questions.

[@eliasstenman3710]

Why no further questions? Oh, wait…

[@yzhk3036]

Every professional scrabble player will lose their job. This is so scary

[@quandaledingle2107]

lmaooo

[@nigerianprince6638]

Chess still has competition dispite computers, scabble will last

[@quandaledingle2107]

@@nigerianprince6638 i think scrabble is like poker in a sense as well cuz you need to look at your opponents face to try to understand what they have so face recognization tech needed if it isnt just machines

[@livenotonevil8279]

Next thing you know, there'll be 3D Scrabble

[@quandaledingle2107]

@@livenotonevil8279 well it might be good ngl

[@matthewhodge5267]

The way google is like "Trust me I drew A, I am going first"

[@franzsazon1940]

I have never showed a lick of interest in scrabble in my life but when youtube recommended me your channel, this just showed me how beautiful the game is. Great content and keep it up my man!

[@wanderer15]

Thanks for watching!

[@axcertypo]

None of this would have happened if you realized Google Bard wanted to open vertically...

[@BLSKYZ]

lol😂

[@vitex198]

You sure man?

[@JackQNielsen]

@@vitex198it’s satire broseph

[@oddatlas739]

Exactly what I was thinking

[@awesomoose7822]

We say that area beyond the 15x15 is unknown, however thanks to the variant super scrabble on a 21x21 board we can predict what bonuses lie in the 6 spaces beyond each edge of the board

[@authorFreeman]

The AI ten years from now: "Humanity has no more moves. I win."

[@asheep7797]

After reassessment, I believe we still have a move: *panic.*

[@user-pf1sf3vb1c]

Yeah it's not going to like this video.

[@JohnShrader]

Pretty sure we can tell it that it won and just ignore it.

[@OfficialGidfather]

If I had known TBEACHUM was good I could’ve won so many more games! Thanks for the education Will

[@wanderer15]

Proud to be of service :)

[@slickgiraffe6650]

"NIP OFF THE T OF DAMPLY" Is like "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra."

[@JamesChurchill3]

Tbeachum. His arms wide.

[@bbateson]

I was hooked when Bard learned to glitch off the map. It got better.

[@gayedemiray]

i actually haven't laughed this much in months, thank you for cheering me up and you got a subscriber!

[@wanderer15]

Appreciate you stopping by!

[@nonamenoname246]

I used to think I knew all the scrabble tactics and was just held back from being a champion by not being good enough at finding words, but now I see that with the new tactics AI is inventing, and my learning of them thanks to your video, the door is open for me to compete in scrabble championships with players who do not keep up with AI. Thank you so much!

[@jgraham1426]

I applaud Chat GPT for its great sportsmanship - going forth with the game despite not wanting to play against the overzealous Google Bard

[@TenementGentleman]

This video has made me rethink all of the scrabble strategies I once knew

[@RubyPiec]

chatgpt playing chess: haha i will summon my queen from literally nowhere!!! chatgpt playing scrabble: haha i will summon letters from literally nowhere!!!

[@ljkai]

*starts extending the board

[@Kerithanos]

How come ChatGPT never plays off the board in Chess? "Knight to N12! Checkmate!"

[@RubyPiec]

@@Kerithanos probably because chess is a more popular game to write notation for

[@mitch-lawless]

I've been telling my mum my whole life about the void tiles outside the board that I like to play on and she always shuts me down. Finally I'm vindicated. Take that mom.

[@Octave03]

This was hilarious. Loving your content recently, keep it up!

[@wanderer15]

Thank you!

[@t-birdmr.t7980]

Playing chess against ChatGPT yields the same LOLs. It captures it's own pieces, moves through pieces, moves pieces in ways they shouldn't. No human can compete.

[@bradenstewart6270]

Pro Scrabble Players: we play on the board with all 7 letters 👀 Ai Scrabble Players: we play off the board with any letter we want 👀 Me: I might just make a bold move like cats on my next turn 👀

[@AKHILESHBALACHANDDER]

Keeping a straight face while recording this video must have been really difficult.

[@omfgacceptmyname]

i cant believe no one thought to make use of off-board squares before... how could we not imagine such strategy?

[@Manigo1743]

It is also interresting that after playing only 6 tiles (QUALMS), ChatGPT still draws 7 tiles on its next turn. Apparently in the future you can just discard whatever tiles you don't care about.

[@nibiew90]

My Scrabble skills, including turning an M into a W (and vice versa) and a W into two Us, have already earned me quite a decent rating. It's amazing to see AI illuminate, sorry, illuminous, the future. What's your estimate of Google Bard's rating - ELO 3400?

[@headlessnotahorseman]

Some people are really strict with the rules, some are willing to bend them almost to breaking. It's interesting to see where you fit in this continwm.

[@marcopallas847]

5:27 was just hilarious! I loved your charisma and delivery on this video

[@m1nqrich]

4:42 not the abcdefg coming out of nowhere lmaoo

[@aguynameddan]

I think I'm going to stop playing now - what is the point of futilely trying to improve myself and my game when perfection has already been achieved? I, for one, welcome our new illuminous overlords.

[@BLSKYZ]

Excellent comment 😂

[@DadgeCity]

Thanks for this. It gave me such a chuckle.

[@wanderer15]

Thanks for watching!

[@xactivateg9686]

I am gonna lose my job as a Scrabble player to these A.I., I just can't compete

[@joshcoughx]

Wow that Final Fantasy victory fanfare was so awesome!

[@StuartBennettUK]

So I arrived by chance and have not laughed so much for ages .. Excellently delivered.. Thank you for this revelation...

[@grantofat6438]

The good thing is, that when these systems are put into cars, and told to drive them, they will most likely drive into a lake before they can do any major harm to innocent people.

[@5688gamble]

All those times I could've hit those triple word scores if I had only thought to play off the end of the board! That is some next level thinking!

[@eliandthatsit]

THis is one of the funniest videos I've ever seen. Almost puked laughing, but that's only because I can't convey fear properly

[@evanyurko3640]

This video has really helped me study for nationals Will. Thanks so much! I will definitely look to game advantage of off the board scoring in the future

[@jellomochas]

3:48 I bet ChatGPT will make a DUM PLAY

[@valkopuhelin2581]

I know nothing about Scrabble, but appreciating this amazing strategy had me rolling on the floor.

[@toast3]

This is very reminiscent of when I saw ChatGPT play chess against an actual chess engine. Lots of, lets call them dubious moves like "Rg8xD4".

[@oddatlas739]

'Off of the T of damply' is a phrase I'm going to be using everyday from now on.

[@MattatNC]

I haven't laughed this hard since "R E T I N A S" Will you are humanity's best commentator thank you

[@nonamenoname246]

I laud your ability to get chatGPT to reconsider and play on. When chatGPT gave up the last time, I I think you could have gotten chatGPT to play on by asking it to draw and tell you its new letters and told FhatGPT a possible word, at which point chatGPT would have apologized for its error and played on. But I am guessing you knew all that but let the game end. Probably the AI's would not have come up with more distinctly new ideas right away to instruct us further on better scrabble play, so that was a good time to wrap it up! Fantastic job in showing us the amazing depths AI is capable of. As far as your question of what humans might do to improve and be able to take on AI at scrabble, I really doubt it: yes humans may quickly learn to copy AI's innovations, but just as quickly, AI will be finding new brilliant ideas to always stay well ahead of humans.

[@javierrodrigo1009]

You should've asked ChatGPT what it thinks the definition of "Tbeachum" is.

[@Hublium]

t·bea·chum, noun, a word to be used in sentences such as: "Good morning, that's a nice tbeachum!"

[@naygoats955]

Incredible luck of bard ai getting the 2.48 * 10^-25% chance for the abcdefg

[@Notester82]

"Oh, this is gonna be like the ChatGPT vs Stockfish match where ChatGPT literally invented new maneuvers, huh?" *watches video* "Yuuuuup" ;u;

[@andrewmilner-white9988]

I've not laughed so hard in a long time, thank you !!!! Brilliant commentary on an inspiring game!!

[@CREEDFANXXX]

Lol great video. I wonder if the Alpha Go program will ever try it's hand at scrabble.

[@FirstLast-gm9nu]

I may be incorrect, but I believe AlphaZero can only play 2 player complete information games and thusly would not be able to play scrabble, or other games with hidden information.

[@barakeel]

But alphastar(Starcraft has fog of war) can play hidden information games, so it's probably possible to train something good.

[@roberthewitt2155]

Maybe the ai is trying to pretend it’s stupid so we get lulled into a false sense of security… or it just wants us to have a good laugh 😂

[@Kirmo13]

Have you seen the chatGPT chess game? So funny

[@wanderer15]

I did - many laugh out loud moments there

[@chrishawkins3215]

This deserves to go viral! Great stuff Will!

[@MrSfein1]

Hilarious...they are really thinking outside the box.

[@pedrovitor8909]

Hey Will! I've been binge watching your Bonus Round series and I wonder if you will be posting any more of those! I really enjoy to see you playing, but honestly I don't know anything about your schedule and if making those types of videos are feasible. Thank you for the content!

[@wanderer15]

Thank you for the kind words! I definitely plan to post more of those, but I'd like to find a way to make them a little "tighter" with respect to runtime. Working on it!

[@sapphiresuicune6787]

I loved when the Final Fantasy fanfare state playing 😂

[@bluemonday127]

im laughing so freaking hard dude thank you for this pot of gold

[@Truthmane2]

Amazing video, Will!

[@AlexDings]

I asked ChatGPT a question that has been troubling me for a long time, but unfortunately its answer wasn't helpful: "I apologize, but as an AI language model, I don't have access to personal information about individuals unless it has been shared with me during our conversation. I can provide general information and answer questions on a wide range of topics. If "wanderer15" is a public figure or a well-known entity, I might be able to assist you with information about them. Can you provide more context or details about who or what "wanderer15" is?"

[@chris18thseymour]

😂

[@SAYFVCKFOR100DOLLARS]

who is wanderer15

[@Dfcameron13]

wanderer15 - not to be confused with happywanderer

[@chrischappa962]

I went into this video expecting an in-depth analysis of how awesome AI can play scrabble. I was not disappointed.

[@RandyDaGamer]

I was laughing throughout this video! I loved it! Entertaining and hilarious! 🤣 Thank you!

[@wanderer15]

Thank you for watching!

[@chrisdavies3129]

Magnificent

[@nwalton125]

Some solid scoring from GPT ... it realizes that STONIER can't be doubled since the A is already covering the star, and that the L of DAMPLY uses the "score the main play again" square located just off the side of the board.

[@natebengtson5252]

This was hilarious 😂

[@l_..l.l.__l..l8833]

This is the folly of language models. They don't have any understanding of what they're saying or trying to achieve, theyre just putting words together in a way that makes sense linguistically. Its the same reason gpt is terrible at math and will argue with you that it is correct even if it clearly isn't

[@MudakTheMultiplier]

You know, neither of them challenged, so those words are all legal.

[@incription]

These moves are out of this world, Will. I'll have to adopt these techniques when I play

[@littleredpony6868]

This seems like how a scrabble game would go down if a couple of six year olds were playing

[@scottherriott4828]

Dude, hilarious concerning "stonier"

[@nonamenoname246]

What people may be missing it that one reason humans are so far behind AI in scrabble play is that, amazingly, the winner of the US scabble championships gets only $10,000 in prize money. Think of all the potential human scrabble talent that has been missed because the brightest brains turn to games that can pay, real money, such as hold-em poker or inside stock trading.

[@HansSiemons]

This is just fantastic!

[@repacharge431]

Ahahahaha this video is hilarious, thank you for making this XD

[@throwaway1743]

These AI programs are so far into the future, they had assumed you meant for them to play 3D Scrabble instead of the primitive 2D variant! Of course it would look like they're playing off the map and stacking tiles, we aren't seeing the full gamebox after all.

[@nerdjournal]

Nice, Mr Anderson is in the Matrix again. Thomas / Will? Big difference. doh!

[@clu2573]

Very nice intro, I to am being held hostage within a small shed in a backyard in the city of Lithium, Missouri. Please help.

[@n8style]

Amazing battle between 2 super star players!

[@rumpelRAINS]

Great video Will!

[@kidada7714]

Google Bard may have learned several of their strategies from the 2020 Presidential election.

[@joesonier1600]

Absolutely hilarious! Very creative, Will! 😂😂

[@yommish]

Truly incredible

[@MikeAngri]

Yes!!!! Great video Will!

[@AlexFromnic]

I don't know of you realized but in playing the word abduction. Google bard also rewrote the earlier word of hello trope and rewrote it Heliourope

[@grantofat6438]

They are so much more advanced than us humans.

[@Quinn222]

Your commentary made my day!😅

[@PenNBrush]

Laughed too hard at this😂

[@beardalaxy]

They're playing upwords, outwords, and notwords while we're all playing scrabble.

[@EyItsAsh]

Genuine question, If your opponent replaced one of your letters to play a word, and you didnt complain or challenge it, would it be valid?

[@BLSKYZ]

Genius video! 😂 May it go the distance to become viral.

[@ed9492]

Infinity Word Score.

[@euboy6]

NIPT made me laugh so hard i had to keep rewinding

[@NemesisAdrestia]

Tnettenba for the 100 points

[@M1412B]

This reminds me of old Harold Delaney’s playing style

[@chrisnelson414]

You almost cost me a keyboard. 🤣

[@dfp_01]

Scrabulizer meets Donald Sauter meets online shitposting. Never thought I'd see the day.

[@BeyondMediocreMandarin]

I wonder if they're both better now.

[@vitex198]

Good game by Google Bard there, ChatGPT got destroyed!

[@runewinsevik8471]

Is it allowed to play outside of the board like this? I never new...

[@wanderer15]

Sadly, as human beings, we are constrained to the board, and it is not allowed. But with ChatGPT, perhaps it will become possible. ;)

[@lamMeTV]

Clickbait title and thumbnail yay thats what I subbed for!

[@Unclekase]

Who knew that scrabble is so easy... I'm coming to win worlds with this newfound knowledge 😁

[@squelchedotter]

The language model obviously has no concept of the board state, but I do wonder if it would work better if you drew the letters for it

[@wanderer15]

For sure. I'm sure the time will come when it knows how keep track of a board - I did try simply giving it letters at random and the same issues arose (I actually started out with myself playing it, but having two AIs play was even funnier)

[@squelchedotter]

@@wanderer15 Ah, it certainly was very entertaining! I don't personally think it will be able to keep track of the board any time soon though to be honest, just because of the limits of this technology. It's only really predicting which sequence of words is most likely to look like a scrabble game, turning that into a 2d table of words is something that would need a very different approach. It's really noticable if you ask it to generate ascii art of a scrabble board ;)

[@eragon78]

@@squelchedotter GPT-4 might be better at it. GPT-4 can take images as an input, which means you can just take an image of the board state instead of trying to describe it in text. So GPT-4 might be better at doing something like this.

[@squelchedotter]

@@eragon78 Not really. They are trained to convert text to images and images to text. So at the end of the day it's still not really capable of things like understanding the rules of scrabble

[@eragon78]

@@squelchedotter Not explicitly, but language models are weird. They have far more ability at things they werent trained to than they SHOULD. Of course that doesnt mean its at all good, and itd still probably try to play illegal moves, but as LLMs get larger, their ability to do random stuff also improves faster than a linear growth. This is actually something GPT-3 was pretty surprising at when it came to stuff like 10 digit addition (which the LLM was not trained on at all, and did not exist frequently in the training data). GPT-3 was better at 10 digit addition by a LARGE MARGIN than what it SHOULD have been capable of. These language models definitely DO NOT understand the full rules to scrabble, and that probably wont change with GPT-4, but it will still likely be capable of playing higher quality moves than GPT-3 still despite never being trained to play scrabble. That's what makes LLM pretty interesting since they are far more capable of doing tasks they were never trained at than they SHOULD be, even if they're still ultimately pretty bad at those things. Anyways, the point is that the image would at least encode the boardstate making actually communicating the current boardstate easier for the AI to understand.