Back in the day (2001) I worked on the PalmOS version of Scrabble. One thing that surprised me when I was tuning the AI was that it played better when all words of seven or more letters were removed from its vocabulary. Apparently searching through the longer words was a worse use of time than searching for other placements of shorter words (except on the highest difficulty, where it was given a larger time budget).
We ended up giving the lower difficulty levels a restricted dictionary anyway, but this was to affect players' perception of the difficulty rather than the actual difficulty (the AI on "beginner" mode shouldn't be playing a lot of words you've never heard of). We adjusted time budgets so that difficulty still ramped up as the dictionary expanded at higher levels.
We ended up giving the lower difficulty levels a restricted dictionary anyway, but this was to affect players' perception of the difficulty rather than the actual difficulty (the AI on "beginner" mode shouldn't be playing a lot of words you've never heard of)
It seems to me like a restricted dictionary or smaller time budget (or, for that matter, dumber search algorithms) are all sensible measures of a low difficulty level. Otherwise you're using "difficulty" to mean "difficult for me to program cleverly" rather than "difficult to beat" or "like a human expert".
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Back in the day (2001) I worked on the PalmOS version of Scrabble. One thing that surprised me when I was tuning the AI was that it played better when all words of seven or more letters were removed from its vocabulary. Apparently searching through the longer words was a worse use of time than searching for other placements of shorter words (except on the highest difficulty, where it was given a larger time budget).
We ended up giving the lower difficulty levels a restricted dictionary anyway, but this was to affect players' perception of the difficulty rather than the actual difficulty (the AI on "beginner" mode shouldn't be playing a lot of words you've never heard of). We adjusted time budgets so that difficulty still ramped up as the dictionary expanded at higher levels.
It seems to me like a restricted dictionary or smaller time budget (or, for that matter, dumber search algorithms) are all sensible measures of a low difficulty level. Otherwise you're using "difficulty" to mean "difficult for me to program cleverly" rather than "difficult to beat" or "like a human expert".
I think you missed the point that a restricted dictionary actually increased the difficulty to the user.
I don't think so? The restricted dictionary is for the AI, not the user.
"it played better when all words of seven or more letters were removed from its vocabulary."
Oh, I see what you mean now. Thanks, I think you're right.