In Scrabble, each letter is worth a number of points. Typically, the rarer the letter, the more score it has, see Scrabble letter distribution and score.
Does anyone know how these scores are being assigned? (Or modified, if needed.) Is it based on some gut-feeling, or a formula/algorithm?
As I see, the score is proportional to surprisal (from information theory), i.e. \log(1/p), where p is the frequency of a given letter in a given language. Just I am not sure, if such scoring is planned mathematically, or appeared as some emergent behavior (e.g. other scoring seems unfair, unnatural, etc…).