I just need your social security number now.

I was playing Scrabble online, and after saying hello to my opponent over the in-game chat, I asked a common question. "So, where are you from?"

"Pretty sure I'm not going to tell you that one. I know how things go on the Internet," she said.

I was surprised, and a little impressed. Most people don't have a clue about privacy on the Internet. At the same time, giving away your state (the usual answer) isn't usually a danger, since that narrows you down to at the least 500,000 people (hello, Wyoming!). I said something to that effect to her, but there was no immediate response.

It made me curious though. She also had a picture of herself and her full name right there as her profile name. "If you're worried about privacy, why do you have your full name right there?" I asked.

"Do you know how many people don't use their real names?" she said.

Well, no. And I noticed that she didn't actually say that wasn't her real name. It was an uncommon name, but it sounded pretty realistic.

I did a quick Google search of that name, which turned up a bare 46 results. Most of them led back to a single MySpace page, owned by a girl with the same name...and the same person in the profile picture. With all sorts of details about the girl, including her age, occupation, home town, which schools she was attending, and the fact that she was going to be away from home for the weekend visiting family.

As it turns out, her home state was pretty uncommon as well. South Dakota. I felt a little guilty; she was probably right not to give it out. That uncommon state, combined with the fact that her name only turned up one significant person, was pretty compelling.

About that time, she posted another message in the Scrabble chat. Apparently she had thought about what I said, and decided that I was right, the state didn't give away that much. "South Dakota," she had posted.

Facebook Scrabble

A week or two ago, Child got interested in playing Scrabble on Facebook, so I signed up as well so I could play.

Facebook Scrabble is a little different from regular Scrabble. You're not allowed to play incorrect words, so there's no challenging of words. In addition, there's a built-in dictionary that you can check words before you play them.

Scrabble purists might squirm, but I can see why Hasbro changed the rules. In a potentially non-real-time game, and with no face-to-face playing, there's no way to prevent people looking up words, and as many words as they want, in a dictionary.

Child takes full advantage of the new rules. On the Scrabble homepage, you can enter in the letters in your hand and the webpage will spit out all possible words you can build from them. I lost miserably to Child, so I decided to build a program to help me.

My new Scrabble program will track the board and the letters in your hand, and on your turn, it will sequence through a dictionary of 174,000 words and find the highest scoring one. It takes bewteen 20 to 30 minutes to run on each turn, depending on how full the board is, which is acceptable since there's no time limit between turns.

A couple things I've learned:

1. If your letters are bad (read: 1 point letters, instead of the nice Vs, Qs, Ms, etc.) then no amount of help will get you good scores.

2. Those high point letters are better used on a triple letter score than a double word score. It's obvious in retrospect, but I've always shot for the double word without stopping to consider whether a triple letter might actually get me a better score.

Ultimate Scrabble Word

Here's your Scrabble word of the day:

pharmacokinetic

If you play it along an edge of the board, where the existing letters are pharmacokinetic (bolded letters are already there [note how they are proper words], unbolded letters are the ones you add), then by my calculations, you should score 914 points.

(3+4+1+(1*2)+3+1+3+1+5+1+1+(1*2)+1+1+3)*3*3*3+50

Setting up a valid board that will allow the playing of this word is left as an exercise to the reader.