Alan Frank, an American computer scientist, linguist, Bridge and Scrabble player, and (Scrabble) programmer. He is author of the Scrabble program Tyler, competing the four early Computer Olympiads, and also wrote Scrabble rating software [1]. At the Heuristic Programming in AI workshop of the 2nd Computer Olympiad, Alan Frank lectured on brute-force search in games of imperfect information [2] . He considered the search problem faced by games of chance (e.g., Backgammon), games of deception (e.g., Bridge), and games like Scrabble and Poker that exhibit both components, but are fundamentally different from games of perfect information like Chess and Go. He showed that even with these uncertainties brute-force search still has a valuable role to play [3].
Alan Frank [4]

Selected Publications

1980 ...

• Alan Frank (1980). On Searching for Vowelless Words. Word Ways, Vol. 13, No. 4
• Alan Frank (1981). Low-Scoring Scrabble Games. Word Ways, Vol. 14, No. 3
• Alan Frank (1982). Long Digrammatic Strings. Word Ways, Vol. 15, No. 2
• Alan Frank (1982). A Friendly Alphabet. Word Ways, Vol. 15, No. 2
• Alan Frank (1982). High-Scoring Boggle. Word Ways, Vol. 15, No. 3
• Alan Frank (1983). Logology by Computer. Word Ways, Vol. 16, No. 4
• Alan Frank (1984). Transaddable Letter Groups. Word Ways, Vol. 17, No. 1
• Alan Frank (1984). Consonant-Characterized Words. Word Ways, Vol. 17, No. 2
• Alan Frank (1984). The Middle of an Alphabetic List. Word Ways, Vol. 17, No. 3
• Alan Frank (1984). Infinite-Tile Scrabble. Word Ways, Vol. 17, No. 4

1985 ...

• Alan Frank (1986). Words With Unusual Shapes. Word Ways, Vol. 19, No. 2
• Alan Frank (1987). Two New Books on Scrabble. Word Ways, Vol. 20, No. 3
• Alan Frank (1987). Ghostbusters. Word Ways, Vol. 20, No. 4

1990 ...

• Alan Frank (1991). Brute Force Search in Games of Imperfect Information. Heuristic Programming in AI 2
• Alan Frank (1992). New Phonetic Name Search Algorithm. Word Ways, Vol. 25, No. 4
• Alan Frank (1992). Can't Stop. Heuristic Programming in AI 3

External Links

• Alan Frank's ICGA Tournaments

References

1. ^ Paul McCarthy (2015). Letterati: An Unauthorized Look at Scrabble® and the People Who Play It. ReadHowYouWant, amazon
2. ^ Alan Frank (1991). Brute Force Search in Games of Imperfect Information. Heuristic Programming in AI 2
3. ^ Tony Marsland (1990). Report on the 2nd London Conference on Computer Games. ICCA Journal, Vol. 13, No. 3
4. ^ Alan Frank Bridge Winners profile

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