[dmit]

In a similar vein: Cheating Hangman, once described as "an app that perfectly recreates the infuriating feeling of playing hangman with your older sibling who was definitely cheating and also knew way more words than you". https://cheatman.danq.me/

Implementation details: https://danq.me/2019/09/26/cheatman/

[boomlinde]

Hatetris (or whichever implementation of that idea came first) appears on this trail:

https://github.com/qntm/hatetris

On the topic of hang man, we played some on breaks at work. Eventually I figured that I could use some tool assistance that scored dictionary words according to their length, the overall frequency of the letters that appear in them, the number of times letters are repeated within the words etc. and from the top of those I manually picked the most obscure ones.

[andreareina]

As far as I can tell bastet[1] goes back to 2004.

[1] http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html

[Dan-Q]

Thanks for the shout-out! Even though I know it cheats (and how) I still play against Cheatman sometimes; the challenge is to make guesses that force the computer to bisect its search space into two approximately-even subdictionaries rather than - as it would prefer - splitting the search space into a smaller (rejected) one and a larger (adopted) one. It means thinking-ahead by about as many steps as there are undiscovered letters in the word, but it's just-about doable!

[kthejoker2]

I love it, 9/10, my only complaint is the dictionary is ever so slightly too broad, I wish there was a filter to at least limit it to, say, OED words only.

But a truly awesome project.