<story><title>A Better Strategy for Hangman</title><url>http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lorax</author><text>An even better strategy would be to weight your guesses towards the most information gain.  If a letter appears often, but is in the same position most of the time, getting it won&apos;t help you as much as getting a letter that appears in fewer words but in more varied positions.  Doing a quick check of 5 letter words in my /usr/share/dict/words file I find:
S: 659,62,267,260,2282
E: 122,829,448,1254,679
A: 252,1201,678,410,307&lt;p&gt;That is, S, when it appears, is heavily skewed towards the last letter in the word, finding it won&apos;t help you figure out the word nearly as well as finding the more evenly distributed E or A.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Better Strategy for Hangman</title><url>http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>r00k</author><text>I loved this blog post (and the other one I read, about Battelship), so I wondered who was behind these great posts.&lt;p&gt;Their homepage says this &quot;DataGenetics is a technology consultancy specializing in unlocking the value stored in large databases. Using a variety of techniques we can mine the trends in your data to help you maximize your marketing and advertising campaigns.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Damn.&lt;p&gt;Yet another group of smart folks focused on more-effective advertising.</text></comment>