Scrabble is a great game and keeps your mind active....but does its letter arrangements make sense? Let's test this question out.
Step 1: Pick up a book at random, turn to a random page, and construct a tally of the first 1000 letters you encounter, sorting them out A - Z.
Step 2: Repeat using a different type of book (e.g. novel vs. math book). Again, create a tally.
Step 3: Repeat tally process but use the front page of a newspaper this time (ignoring headlines).
Step 4: Merge your three tallies and find the percent of occurance for each of the 26 letters (e.g. the letter e occurred 14% of the time).
Step 5: Multiply each of these percent values by 100, which becomes an estimate of the number of tiles for a particular letter amongst the 100 tiles produced as part of a Scrabble game.
Step 6: Compare your results to an actual Scrabble game.
Step 7: Now reflect on the experiment. What could have gone wrong, etc.? Any spurious assumptions made?
Step 8: Repeat the same experiment, but using different languages. Compare against the adjusted frequencies of letters for Scrabble games in other languages.
