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Everyone likes scrabble.. right? Help researchers improve AI. (ciigar.csc.ncsu.edu)

2 points by barik ↗ HN
How do people play games? We are researchers at North Carolina State University (Digital Games Research Lab). Help participate in research by spending a few minutes or more playing a variation of a popular online game, Words with Friends (Scrabble). Playing our game will help us improve the design of games in many areas, including usability, interaction, and artificial intelligence.<p>We are interested in a variety of in-game actions, such as what words people choose, why people shuffle (and when), the circumstances in which people choose to swap tiles, and more. Data collection on this type of work is difficult to obtain in general, so we hope you'll take a few moments to play the game. Plus, it's fun to play.<p>Feel free to post questions or comments here. We thought this study would be interesting to some of HN members here, particularly to those individuals working in the area of social games.<p>Thank you for supporting science!

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barik
We are researchers at North Carolina State University. Help participate in research by spending a few minutes or more playing a variation of a popular online game, Scrabble. Playing our game will help us improve the design of games in many areas, including usability, interaction, and artificial intelligence.

In particular, we're really interested in how people make decisions in games. Why do people shuffle? When do they shuffle? Why do people swap? When do they swap? How often do people play optimal words? What are time intervals between words? Do people change their minds after placing words? There are a host of such questions that a simple game like Scrabble can help us with to create believable agents, rather than simply optimal agents.

If you have any questions about the study, please feel free to post them here and I'll do my best to respond. It's difficult to get data on HCI studies in any reasonable way. Participating in studies is good for karma.

Thanks in advance! The game is free to play, you can play as many times as you want, there is no annoying survey or questionnaire, and even playing for a minute or so is useful for us -- even that means that you submit only a single word to the system.