Very cool. I was implementing Hangman a few weeks back and I figured out the first strategy, use the frequency distribution for the specific length to initiate

Very cool. I was implementing Hangman a few weeks back and I figured out the first strategy, use the frequency distribution for the specific length to initiate your guessing. However, I thought about but discarded the second strategy of conditioning on the previous wrong/right guesses and selecting words and then doing a histogram of the letters. Thinking back, I find it interesting that thinking about it from a complexity point of view made me dread that approach because it becomes significantly more expensive to do the recomputation of frequency distributions compared to blindly uses the naive independence assumption and I was not sure how much of a win I would get by adding that bit of optimization.