Nigel

Nigel is a crossword puzzle solving computer program designed to generate moves for the Scrabble crossword puzzle game produced by Hasbro. Nigel is designed to assist players with strategy and technique. The associated interface was developed to give users the ability to play against Nigel or watch Nigel play against itself, whilst performing analysis on the given game. The program can be used to play other humans exclusively, although that is not recommended. Just go out and purchase the board game.

Download

An imcomplete version of the Nigel interface is available for download here. It will be a while before the interface is completed, and even a beta release is available for download. However, at the moment, feedback concerning Nigel and the Nigel interface is certainly appreciated.

Click here to download Nigel for Linux or Windows (this will also work on Macs, but the other is preferred).

Click here to download for Mac. To install, double click the icon, and then drag the Nigel icon into your applications folder.

To run on Windows or Mac simply double click on the file. On Linux, locate the file and run java -jar Nigel.jar. You must have Java 1.5 or later installed on your computer to run Nigel.

History

Nigel was developed by Daniel and Jonah Scheinerman (brothers) in December of 2010, as a programming exercise to make a program that could play Scrabble. This turned out to be a much more nuanced project than initially imagined. Nigel started off as a very slow Python program that could take up to thirteen minutes per move, and has since made significant leaps in sophistication.

Contributing

We're always happy for people to support this, and no, not by giving us money! YOU can help us enormously by contributing some of your computing power to help us improve Nigel's strategy engine. Its simple: click here to download the helper program.

By downloading this you can run simulations of Scrabble games on your home computer. These games provide useful data for determining the value of certain combinations of letters, racks, board positions, and more! All you have to do is run the program and press GO! The program will run simulation games on your computer and save them in a 'games' folder. When you've amassed a sizable amount of games, zip 'em up and send them on over to our dedicated Nigel email address: nigel.scrabble.ai@gmail.com. If you want specifics on how the program runs, see the README included in the download.

Now this program can and will take up a lot of your processing power, so when can you dedicate some time for your computer to help us out? Maybe you’re away for the weekend, or you have to go to a doctor’s appointment. You can leave it running on a computer at home while you go to work or to class. You can let it run overnight in a different room from where you sleep. These would be ideal times to run the program: elongated periods of time where you’re busy doing something else and your computer would be sitting idle otherwise.

DOWNLOAD NOW! Don't worry if you can't contribute a lot, every game helps!

If you have any questions please feel free to shoot us an email over at nigel.scrabble.ai@gmail.com