Scrabble Showdown: Quackle vs. David Boys
Using words like qadi (a Muslim judge), anuria (the nonpassage of urine) and alif (a type of spinal fusion), a software program called Quackle beat David Boys 482-465 in the final round of the 2006 Scrabble Open in Toronto. Boys, a computer programmer who won the world Scrabble championship in 1995, got the chance to battle Quackle in the finals after besting some 100 competitors in an 18-round match leading up to the human-vs.-computer showdown. Boys started off strong, beating Quackle, an open-source program whose chief designers included students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the first two games of the best-of-five series. But Quackle came back strong and won the last three rounds. In one especially tricky move, the computer played the word deviating by connecting two disconnected I's. For his part, Boys displayed a touch of sore-loser spirit after the loss, saying, "It's still better to be a human than to be a computer."