Jason Katz-Brown has been described as having a “certain MIT feel about him.” This could refer to the fact that he wears cargo shorts in the dead of winter or the fact that he has a large pink seesaw in his dorm room. Or maybe it’s because he has memorized every word in the Scrabble dictionary that he always carries in the pocket of those shorts.

A 20-year-old junior at MIT, Katz-Brown is a star in the quirky world of competitive Scrabble. Last April, after just three years of playing, he was ranked number one* in North American Scrabble after he won the Boston Area Scrabble Tournament. (He will try to defend that title in Westford on Friday.) But what’s really got the Scrabble world buzzing about Katz-Brown is his role in creating Quackle , an artificial intelligence program that defeated a former world champion in the finals of a human vs. computer tournament in Toronto in November.

Read more about Jason Katz Brown, the creator of quackle, at boston.com.

* Cross-tables has Katz-Brown ranked tenth in North America.

Posted on April 10th, 2007 by Barry
Filed under: News