py-Hangman

A python implementation of the hangman game. Complemented with a rule-based NLP system.

Implementation

Human Player

1. Obtains a list of 5 to 7 letter words MIT's word API
2. A word in randonly selected for the list
3. User guesses the word, character by character but has length of word + 1 guess
4. User can only put guess one letter at the time
5. If chacracter is present in chosen word, position is replaced else asterisk remains in the position
6. Words are displayed at each step

AI Player

1. Receives a random word
2. Narrows down the se of words by length first
3. Builds a table of frequencies for each letter
4. Provides the most probable word
5. If present, all positions where it belongs are revelead all words not containing the word are letter are discarded, even at the position they appear
6. The word set are adjusted
7. The frequency of each letter are calculated
8. Steps 3 - 7 are repeated till the game is done

To-Do

1. Get a larger dictionary of words
2. Build a GUI

Insights

• Currently the game has a global win/loss ratio of 42.199% / 57.801%
• This low win ratio can be attributed to the fact that we use a very small dictionary (10000 words). I think if you increase the size of the dictionary, the AI's accuracy would increase.
• Also currently, we are not guessinc words wrongly, only incompletely. I think, wrong guesses would also become more prevalent as we increase the dictionary size, especially for words who differ by just a letter, and one of those letters in more prevalent in the English langauge than the other.

How to Use

• Clone the repository

• python -m venv env

• source env/bin/actiavte (Linux or Mac) | source env/Scripts/activate (Windows)

• pip install -r requirements.txt

  1. statistics: python main.py --stats
  2. ai player: python main.py --ai
  3. human player: python main.py --human

Running Tests

python -m unittest discover -v