Erica

With all this bad weather, and given my still healing arm, I have
been playing a lot of on-line scrabble, with Just Words. I went through
a phase of trying to see how my 'opponent' - medium difficulty - strategized.
I'm currently winning most of the time, I think because I think ahead and
my opponent doesn't. Falls into the traps I lay by opening the board. (In fact,
it is to my advantage to open the board, because I am working for high point badges!!).

I often win not because I have accumulated more points to the end, but because
opponent gets stuck with high unused letter penalties at the end.

I often let my opponent begin, which is a double point freebie. Used to do this
only when I had a poor opening hand.

Opponent is actually generous in certain ways: will never place all the letters at
once, which is a huge advance. Will often forego placing an s on a high-pont word.
But is really ruthless about taking advantage of those triple-scores, or at least it
seems to me...

Because that is the weird thing; I am starting to feel I need to be more careful
and ethical in my relationship to opponent. Maybe the machine knows and is
contemptuous of my predatory behaviour, or the fact that I stay at medium
difficulty and don't go on to hard. (It is a less open game, with a lot of three-letter
words in all the spaces, so I don't expand my vocabulary by playing.)

I've been using a lot of my recently acquired terms and word blocs from chemistry
and biology: amine, oxy ...
...

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