I gave a talk at !!Con a few weeks ago. The talk was called “Scrabble Sucks! Toward higher-order word games.” The talk is about some problems I have with Scrabble, and some of the games I’ve made in response to those problems. Download the slides and notes here. There are a few slides I didn’t get to ub my actual presentation, comparing a sizable corpus of Scrabble games to Lexcavator‘s list of all words that players have ever found, that are included in the PDF above for your perusal.

I had a lot of fun participating in !!Con. I was a little nervous talking right before Mark-Jason Dominus, whom I venerated back in my Perl-slinging days, and whose Higher-Order Perl is what I was riffing off of with the subtitle of my talk (except I wasn’t talking about higher-order functions; I was talking about higher-order n-grams.) But everything worked out okay, and I’m glad I got to give my talk to such an enthusiastic and receptive crowd.