4 ms·
I kept waiting for the other foot to drop, and it never did. This is great if you're playing hangman against a computer. Probably, you're not. You're playing
by jtheory 15y ago
I kept waiting for the other foot to drop, and it never did.
This is great if you're playing hangman against a computer. Probably, you're not.
You're playing against a person, who probably has some sense of your strategies.
Even when I was a kid, we didn't play hangman by choosing random words. What's the fun in that? You notice how the other person plays, and in the next rounds you pick words that break their strategies.
You notice they are doing the "common letters" or even "common vowels" strategy, and you give them "lynx".
Or you trick them with a word that has a few easy-to-get letters, but is going to be hard to guess the last few because there are so many possible matching words -- I had a great one that I forget now... maybe "budder"?
Did everyone really play with randomly-chosen words? What a waste.
- eru 15y agoYou can repeat a similar analysis like they did against an opponent who chooses carefully and knows your strategy. With the theory of two person zero-sum games you can even prove that there's a perfect strategy both for the guesser and the chooser each that doesn't get worse if the other party knows it. (Hint: the strategies will involve random selection with carefully weighted probabilities.)
- hluska 15y agoGreat comment - in hangman, choosing letters solely on the basis of data (no matter how complete the data or how compelling the study) is a highly predictable (and thus highly defeatable) strategy. Of course, this analysis has a counterpoint. If I try to pick words strategically, I suspect that my words would begin to follow patterns...
- jtheory 15y agoTo be sure. I recall we'd mostly stick with the two strategies I mentioned (words with most rare letters, or words in very common patterns)... then when you're settling into a pattern (and your opponent's first guesses are "x" or "q" or similar), throw in something like "teat" to throw them for a loop. We did have one minor rule change -- definitely more than 11 line segments to hang the man. If you had a really good word, and wanted to draw out the torture, you'd start drawing in facial features, fingers... It also adds a bit of artistic fun to the game; you don't even have to be hanging a "man" if you want to get creative; it could be a giant insect, horse, whatever. It would still be pretty clear who was "winning" by how long the string of crossed-out letters were by each round.
- thyrsus 15y agoMy favorite strategy: four letter word. Say no to everything until they guess U: _ U _ _ then decide on the least likely word which includes none of their guesses, often "junk".
- doctoboggan 15y agoThat isn't a strategy, that is cheating. ;)
- Someone 15y agoIf you play that way in Dutch, you can use three letters and even give away that the word ends in 'ak'. That leaves at least BDGHJLMPRTVWYZ for the first letter (A and K give valid words, too, but will already have been guessed) In general, shorter words are harder to guess in hangman.
- mrb 15y agoI cheat the same way by selecting "_OO_". Guessers get frustrated because, intuitively, it doesn't look like there are 30+ english words matching this pattern: root, fool, loom, noon, etc :-)
- harryh 15y agoClearly we should have a hangman challenge similar to the RoShamBo challenges people used to run to explore possibly strategies in a multi turn game. http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsb-results1.html http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsb-results1.html