Towards a fairness solution of Scrabble with Komi system

Artificial intelligence (AI) has a long-standing and healthy relationship with games where it becomes a popular application area for AI-driven research such as game playing, game design and so on. With the recent advancement of AI game-playing programs that had exceeded human capabilities, fairness becomes an important issue to be addressed in order to ensure the attractiveness of a game can be retained to the future players. Such an issue may also be compounded when considering the context of turn-based games, where the first player may have a huge advantage over the subsequent player(s) (called the advantage of initiative). As such, this paper proposes an innovative way to make a game attractive while maintaining fairness by adopting the Komi (compensation system). This fairness solution is validated by applying the system onto a word anagram game, Scrabble, where fairness can be maintained based on the skill level of the players.