https://github.com/raypereda/hangman

a computer player for the game hangman based on the idea of Shannon's entropy and information theory
https://github.com/raypereda/hangman

entropy hangman shannon

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a computer player for the game hangman based on the idea of Shannon's entropy and information theory

• Host: GitHub
• URL: https://github.com/raypereda/hangman
• Owner: raypereda
• Created: 2011-10-19T20:19:44.000Z (over 14 years ago)
• Default Branch: master
• Last Pushed: 2017-07-15T02:57:50.000Z (almost 9 years ago)
• Last Synced: 2025-03-04T12:19:16.793Z (over 1 year ago)
• Topics: entropy, hangman, shannon
• Language: Java
• Homepage:
• Size: 502 KB
• Stars: 2
• Watchers: 1
• Forks: 2
• Open Issues: 0
• Metadata Files:
  • Readme: README.TXT

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README

          
This java program performs tests on strategies

for playing the pencil and paper game hangman.

Given a maximum number of wrong guess and maximum number of moves looked-ahead,

this program makes theoretically optimal next guess. I wrote this program as part

of a challenge just to get an interview at factual.com. The interviewer told me that

I was in the top 2 or 3 in terms of speed and winning games. I was never given an

example where I did worse. The company did not provide any benchmark comparing

this program to theirs. Oh well. Lesson learned. Probably a bad idea to invest

time and energy in that interview.

On the happy side, I taught myself how to apply some cool ideas from Shannon's entropy,

and information theory. Hopefully you can get some ideas on how to apply this theory

to your application. 

Ray Pereda

raypereda_at_gmail

Running the program

===================

$ java -jar hangman.jar

Usage: java -jar hangman.jar [--OPTION] ...

Score a set of words for a hangman strategy.

Example 1: java -jar hangman.jar --valid-words=words.txt --random-seed=7 --random-test-size=100

Example 2: java -jar hangman.jar --valid-words=words.txt --max-wrong-guesses=5 --words-to-score=score.txt

Required Option:

  --valid-words=FILE        obtain list of valid words from FILE

Not Required Options:

  --max-wrong-guesses=NUM   set maximum number of wrong guesses to NUM. Defaults to 5.

  --look-ahead=NUM          set number of guesses to look ahead to NUM. Defaults to 1.

  --help                    display this help and exit

Option 1: For scoring a set of randomly selected words:

  --random-seed=NUM         set the random seed generator to NUM. Defaults to 0.

  --random-test-size=NUM    select NUM random words from valid words file for test.

Option 2: For scoring a set of preselected words:

  --words-to-score=FILE     obtain list of words to score from FILE

Note that the look-ahead option is experimental and doesn't improve the guessing

scores. The default value of 1 will typically yield just as good results as other

lookahead values. The runtime of the program typically increases exponentially with

the number of guesses looked ahead.

List of Files

=============

README.TXT - this file

hangman.jar - executable jar file

src - folder with source files

score.txt - a sample list of words for testing

words.txt - a list of valid words, aka a dictionary

output-example1.txt - sample ouput made using the command-line below

  $ java -jar hangman.jar --valid-words=words.txt --random-seed=0 --random-test-size=100 > output-example1.txt

output-example2.txt - sample output made using the command-line below

  $ java -jar hangman.jar --valid-words=words.txt --max-wrong-guesses=5 --words-to-score=score.txt > output-example2.txt

design-notes.txt - some design notes, showing the progression of ideas for better strategies.

Below is a list of the source files.

$ ls -1R src

combinations

hangman

src/combinations:

Combinations.java

Combos.java

src/hangman:

AbstractRunConfiguration.java

AbstractScoring.java

CharArray.java

ComboAndEntropy.java

CommandLineException.java

CommandLineParser.java

EntropyGuessingStrategy.java

FileReader.java

FixedWordsRunConfiguration.java

FixedWordsScoring.java

Guess.java

GuessLetter.java

GuessWord.java

GuessingStrategy.java

HangmanGame.java

Math2.java

Partition.java

RandomWordsRunConfiguration.java

RandomWordsScoring.java

RunConfiguration.java

Scoreable.java

Timer.java