On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 6:33 PM Mike Beeler <mikebeeler2@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
This isn't quite right, because your score isn't the number of guesses, it's the number of *incorrect* guesses. Given two guesses with the same expected information gain, you would choose the one that is more likely to be in the word. And you'd prefer a guess with slightly less expected information if it had a sufficiently higher chance of being in the word. Andy