[Windows Mobile Apps and Games] acrosser:
CPU cheaters!

Weird... every time I play the computer opponents (Normal or Hard), they don't "cheat" with me.

I know why they cheated in v1.1 and fixed it (a buggy for loop that wouldn't detect when the CPU had generated two invalid moves in a row while it scanned the board, allowing the 2nd of the two moves to be considered as a possible CPU move).... but there must be a different reason why they are still cheating. Maybe they are becoming self-aware and believe it's in their best interest to cheat. I may need to program a self-destruct button into Scrobble in case they take over your phone and start "drunk-dialing" your exes. --- If anyone can provide some specifics about when they cheat, that would be helpful: is it only when they use blanks? or any time? is it the "main word" that is invalid [the main word being the word that is formed by 2 or more of their letters placed in the same direction] or the extra words that are created as a side effect of their main word, or both? is it only Normal difficulty or Hard or both? is it towards the beginning, middle or end of the game, or all 3?

I've had a cold the last few days so I haven't had much energy to work on it and test it. But I'll debug it over the next few days and try to figure out what's going on. (If anyone knows C# and has Visual Studio .NET 2008 and wants to help... let me know and I will send you the source code project/solution zipped).

Changing colors wouldn't be too hard (you can check out my program Spacetornado Renamer at http://renamer.spacetornado.com for an idea of how that would work), but the board size and tile size are hard-coded. They are constants that could be changed, but it would be a lot of work. I suppose I could implement a zoom-in/zoom-out function... but this would involve an extensive rewrite. I really just started this as my first little Windows Mobile project... and was planning on writing other programs (I'd like to write a little SMTP mail client that uses voice commands and voice recognition so you can compose and send an email all by voice; and maybe have it read the email back to you before you send it). So really I'd like to get to a point with Scrobble where it works, is playable... may not look the greatest or have a bunch of features, but is an entertaining little time-killer game... so I can go on to other projects! :)

EDIT: I just looked up TEGG and REIRD in the Scrobble v1.2 English dictionary ("SOWPODS") and although those are odd words, they are both in the dictionary. The SOWPODS dictionary is the largest English Scrabble dictionary, and is used in most major Scrabble tournaments outside the U.S. and Canada. And English has a bunch of really strange words in it!

What words exactly is it playing? Have you looked them up in the Scrobble dictionary using the Game -- "Look up word" tool? If that says they are in the dictionary, then they are in the SOWPODS dictionary and are legal words. The computer players don't know what words are common and what words are rare/obscure... so it will play a mix of all of them (even the NORMAL difficulty AI player... which just chooses a move randomly based on various score ranges).