Maybe you could feed it a bunch of human-written texts, and it could extract word usage stats to make up the list?Now that we have this data, we can start analyzing it:In a 10-game, we will beat it 50% of the time.On a sidenote, my favorite Hangman word has always been “cwm.” “Phlegm” is a good one too. ;)I think a big part of the fun of playing Hangman is trying to pick a word you don’t think your audience is familiar with.
This is an incontrovertible fact.Y is in there it can sometimes be counted as a vowel. "Settle the best you can," was his final direction to Coplen.But the purest and best matrons of Greece refuse to be my guests.What Is The Difference Between “It’s” And “Its”?Absentee Ballot vs. Mail-In Ballot: Is There A Difference? Enough to converge to within 10% of the true outcome and enough for a rough ordering. They don’t do as well as the 3–5 letter words, but you can’t beat “powwowing”, “bowwowing”, and “huzzahing” for entertainment!Doesn’t this belong in the P != NP discussion?Useful and nice analysis! I’ve asked a few friends (we’re all in our 30s), and they said the same.I did trial-and-error and found out if I lead with S, N, L, and A, the default algorithm of guessing the most common letter works from there on out.A superior hangman word: zyzzyvaOne could also consider prefixes and suffixes or common letter groupings (e.g. Plus, many words in use in the English language were borrowed from other languages. Acquiesce. When I played my daughter, I used short words, as I had assumed they were easier (they are certainly easier for her to spell), but I was surprised to discover that the average mistake rate is highest for short words. At this point, it doesn’t know the word, so starts pattern matching. 2 words for each letter in the alphabet. And if not, would it have made the cut?your program can’t actually think like a human, that’s the problem. @Douglas McClean: The problem with this logic is that Hangman is an asymmetric game. Cathedral. Finally, it guessed ‘m’ because it had -ix. 4. Cogent. Thanks though! Every letter guessed eliminates words containing that letter, until toward the end any letter will be included in some of the words, so the guesser wants to choose the letter that eliminates the most words.I wonder, though, if it would be possible to simulate this, rather than playing thousands of games against real humans. All three bits of information can reduce the dictionary very quickly. This is what I hinted at in the “solvability of the 13-game”, where there is, on average, plenty of spare life to risk.Here is the result that I get for the word “difficult”:Here is the distribution of game outcomes. Contumacious. I remember in school that we learned the trick of using “lynx” to catch people out – but then everyone caught on. Here you can find the coolest words in English to help you improve your vocubalary, writing and speaking or just to impress your friends. To exhaust with attacks.
The reason seems to be simply that the more the letters vary, the less likely a person is to miss them. Eventually the two algorithms would likely converge on a point where every word has the same win ratio, and we will know the optimal game outcome.I am sorry but this was kind of boring, the only thing I wanted to know what the hardest words in hangman was, not all of that.Wouldn’t it be better to guess based on minimizing the number of remaining candidate words which you won’t be able to eliminate, rather than guessing based on trying to avoid wrong guesses? Autonomy. Hangman rewards “playing it safe” pretty heavily.In my area, we always played Hangman with only six guesses. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause.