Indic Scrabble

Scrabble is a popular word game originally designed for English. Later it was adopted in many other languages.This an attempt to bring the Scrabble like game to Indian Languages targeted to work on mobiles and tablets.

Dynamic Nature of Scripts

• Scripts of Indic Languages are dynamic in nature i.e. characters(or letters) assume new display form (Glyph) based on the context.
• For an instance Telugu is a South Indian Language which has around 100milion native speakers.
• It consists of 16 vowels and 38 Consonants and 2 Modifiers i.e. Total 56 Letters.
• When a Consonant combined with a vowel it takes a new glyph form i.e. 38*16 = 608 Glyphs
• Each Consonant also has a subscript form i.e. additional 38 Glyphs
• The subscript form is assumed by a consonant when it is combined with another consonant.
• Roughly atleast 56 + 608 + 38 = 702 Glyphs (or Tiles) are needed to build Scrabble like game for Telugu (or for any other Indian Languages) with frequency of one tile for each glyph.

Rules

• Syllable (Aksharam) is the writing unit for Indic Languages. A Syllable is a combination of Letters/Chars.
• Logically and Linguistically it makes sense to place a valid Syllable on the Board Cell(or Square).
• When we say that a valid Syllable can only be placed on board then it increases the no. of tiles needed. This number is theoretically infinite. But ususally be thousand's only in real.
• Hence I came up with following rules or exceptions for Indic Scrabble.
  • A tile placed on the board can be altered by adding new tile(s) to form a new Syllable.
  • Total of 16 tiles would be used with 8 Consonants and 8 Vowels + Modifiers. Combining Consonants with Vowels and Modifiers is very frequent and in fact most of the syllables ends with one of the vowels or modifiers.

Languages

• Telugu
• Kannada
• Hindi (Devanagari Script)
• Sinhala
• Other Languages (Immediate Targets)
  • Nepali
  • Tamil
  • Punjabi
  • Gujarati

Bots and Vocabularies

• AI based Agents are planned. Current Bot Intelligence is State based.
• Current Bots have the same level of intelligence but have different levels of vocabulries.
• Bots uses the browser resources to think But it is possible to configure bots to have their own intelligence (Remote/in-memory etc).
• Average response time of the Bot to select a move is between 80ms to 8sec. Bots take more time as the size of vocabulary and state of the board.
• Current Framework uses Regular Expressions to shortlist the words.
• Vocabulary source is pre-complied in to tile format.
• Currently Telugu has 9 Bots , Kananada has 3 Bots and Hindi has 2 Bots.
• Bots were named after the source of vocabulary.
• Bots: Telugu:
  • ఆంధ్రభారతి
  • పోతన
  • ఈనాడు
  • బీబీసీ
  • బైబిలు
  • ఆంధ్రజ్యోతి
  • కినిగె
  • వసారా
  • వీవెనుడు
• Bots: Kannada:
  • ವಿಜಯ
  • ಉದಯವಾಣಿ
  • ಬೈಬಲ್
• Bots: Hindi
  • बीबीसी
  • बाइबिल

Technologies

• The game designed to work on a browser with no or minimum server round trips.
• ASP.NET (C#.NET) as the Server Language but any other language can also be used. Python is my personal choice for porting.
• JavaScript/Typescript(version 1.8).
• React(version 15.0.0) with Redux.

Demo

http://indicscrabble.apphb.com/