On 4 May 2020 at 21:34, Thane Plambeck wrote:
evil hangman is the usual word-guessing game with a puzzle-setter who reserves the right to secretly change the sought word mid-game to another one that's still consistent with all your guesses so far.
I did that for "jotto" a fair bit ago: I wrote a jotto player that solved by trying the test word that'd get the most information from the number of "jots". And when it was setting the problem, it didn't pick a word, but when a guess was made, it'd find all the words that are consistent with that guess, divide them into sets by jot-results and picked a random word from the set that had the *most* possible words left. It remembered that set, but did the same decision making as the guesser made subsequent guesses. So until there was exactly ONE word that was consistent with all the guesses and all the jot-answers the program had given, it played on.. when there was only one left it said "you got it". /Bernie\ Bernie Cosell bernie@fantasyfarm.com -- Too many people; too few sheep --