This is a Rust implementation of some of the concepts featured in the video hangman is a weird game by jan Misali. The intent is to measure the performance of various strategies for playing the game Hangman.
In its current form, this program takes in a list of lowercase ASCII words line-by-line from STDIN and tests three different strategies against these words. These strategies are:
- Guessing letters in a random order.
- Guessing letters in order of their frequency (by my measurement).
- Guessing letters using the proposed optimal strategy (guess whichever letter appears in the greatest number of candidate words based on available information).
The dictionary I used for testing was generated using the following command:
cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -x '[a-z]\+'
On my machine, this had 210,687 entries and produced the following results:
- On average, the first strategy made 16.06 incorrect guesses.
- On average, the second strategy made 9.62 incorrect guesses. The hardest words to guess included
juju,ajaja, andjab. - On average, the third strategy made 1.70 incorrect guesses (further testing revealed that this was heavily dependent on the size of the provided dictionary). The hardest words to guess included
vuln,cack,hill, andscuff.
Testing the third strategy on the entire word list required under fifteen minutes, averaging out to about 300 words per second.