Created : September 2017

This is a quick script I wrote to solve hangman puzzles. The "word" string is declared with known letters and unknown letters (represented by an asterick). There is an array of guessed letters. The script loops through a file of 479,000 known English words, printing out all that match the parameters given. Credit for the dictionary goes to dwyl/english-words.

This is not a complex script, nor is there an intuitive interface. I wrote this in 10 minutes to solve a hangman contest online. Possible improvements would be a better interface (even just CLI arguments), or more intelligent guessing. A dull solution could be to dynamically accept letters, and print out appropriate responses and likely guesses based on the statistics of possible words. For example:

> python hangman.py "e*ep***nt"

> "There are 38 words that match this expression. Guess the letter 'h' next."

Other more interesting implementations could be to use a machine learning algorithm to intelligently guess letters and play the game by itself until it is solved (or a point of unsolvability), or be able to give it hints "this is a food" or "this is an animal" and have the program intelligently guess based on those. But I will likely never do that.