Re-evaluating the values of the tiles in Scrabble™

   

Recently I have seen quite a few blog posts written about re-evaluating the points values assigned to the different letter tiles in the Scrabble™ brand Crossword Game.  The premise behind these posts is that the creator and designer of the game assigned point values to the different tiles according to their relative frequencies of occurrence in words in English text, supplemented by information gathered while playtesting the game.  The points assigned to different letters reflected how difficult it was to play those letters: common letters like E, A, and R were assigned 1 point, while rarer letters like J and Q were assigned 8 and 10 points, respectively.  These point values were based on the English lexicon of the late 1930’s.  Now, some 70 years later, that lexicon has changed considerably, having gained many new words (e.g.: EMAIL) and lost a few old ones.  So, if one were to repeat the analysis of the game designer in the present day, would one come to different conclusions regarding how points should be assigned to various letters?

Zombpocalypse

Here at the Virtuosi, we're concerned. We are concerned that perhaps the world is really not ready for a zombie apocalypse. You know, the kind of zombie apocalypse that you may have seen in such classics as "Night of the Living Dead", "Shaun of the Dead", or perhaps the even more recent "Zombieland" (sweet cameo by the way). The kind of zombpocalypse that could leave major cities void of life and the country plagued with the undead.

Well, Alemi and I were curious as to how likely such a pandemic was to occur and what it would look like in the simplest of models. In typical Virtuosi fashion, we threw some physics at it and this is what we came up with.