logoalt Hacker News

kenstoday at 3:33 PM1 replyview on HN

What I'm interested in is the best starting word. Using Shannon entropy, the paper finds that it is "tares".


Replies

bee_ridertoday at 3:46 PM

I think it depends on whether you use a conventional dictionary as the population of possible words, the valid guess list, or the (known, at the time, for the originally version of the game at least) possible solution list. I guess you could also use the possible solution list minus the words that had already been guessed in previous iterations.

I mean, you had to give yourself an artificial constraint because IIRC the next solution was actually built into the page anyway, not obfuscated in any way.