Scrabble

I love the game, honestly. Frequently of an evening you will find me engaged in an exciting and hotly-contested game of Scrabble against the computer. (The excitement is mainly provided by my determination to lose by fewer than 200 points one day.) But sometimes - for instance, when the computer places "MAZHBI" strategically on the board and makes more points with one move than I am likely to make in an entire game - I just have to give up.

Incidentally, I don't know what MAZHBI means, just as I do not know what GJU means, or CAJEPUTS, or SUQ, or any of the scores of other incomprehensible and frequently unpronounceable tile combinations that the computer has used to turn the scoreboard into something resembling a Big and Small diagram in a kindergarten classroom.

The unfairness of it all is that there is no way I can win against the brute force of the machine. By the time I have fiddled with my tiles for a couple of minutes and figured out that RETAILS is an anagram of SALTIER, the computer has evaluated about thirty thousand moves, calculated the probability that I will be able to hook onto any of them, and worked out at least five different ways to make 241 points. There is simply no way to estimate my probability of winning because science hasn't invented numbers small enough.

It really makes you long for the good old days of Scrabble according to the Pocket Oxford Dictionary, when you could feel thrilled if you made 20 points with one move.