Nice game, Thane! And the YouTube video is good, but I’m disappointed that he says the best strategy is the letter that occurs in the most still-possible words. I suspect that is rarely the case. With hangman, you get two kinds of information: is the guessed letter present, and if so, where does it occur. You should guess the letter that, against all the still-possible words, gets you the greatest expected information. Especially near the end, you may want to limit it to letters that do occur in at least one still-possible word, but that’s a very minor tweak. Also, there is an interesting question of whether a computer guesser can and should figure out likely “words” that are not in its dictionary, being kind to a poser who may have chosen a not-quite-real or overly obscure word. As Bernie points out, an evil Jotto poser can prolong that game. But not by terribly much. My program that played either side had a bit with each word to flag “foreign/obscure/obscene/questionable”. It used these in guessing, but never as its secret word as a poser; about half the words had the bit set, but the machine still won a lot. [ “Information Theory and the Game of JOTTO”, MIT AI Lab Memo #218, 1971, by me. ] — Mike
On May 5, 2020, at 4:16 PM, Allan Wechsler <acwacw@gmail.com> wrote:
There is a good video about hangman at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le5uGqHKll8.
On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 12:28 PM Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote:
That's fun! But I think there's a bug. On length 6, guess eariotnslcm. It says there are two words left, presumably "humbly" and "dumbly". Guess bly, still two words left. Why if I guess 'h' does it not say "humbly" is wrong and leave 1 word left?
On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 10:35 PM Thane Plambeck <tplambeck@gmail.com> 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.
we put up a version you can try here (as the guesser)
http://labs.counterwave.com/evilhangman/
there's a recent paper about evil hangman in the arxiv, too (not our
work),
but we simply wanted to play it, so we created this thing.
-- Thane Plambeck tplambeck@gmail.com http://counterwave.com/ _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike https://reperiendi.wordpress.com
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