From: Ruby Quiz <james@...>
Date: 2007-07-06T23:18:17+09:00
Subject: [QUIZ] Hangman (#130)

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by Brian Candler

Most people are probably familiar with the game of Hangman. The first player
picks a word or phrase, and the second player has to guess it a letter at a
time. If they make six wrong guesses (i.e. the target word does not contain the
guessed letter), they lose. If they guess the entire word before then, they win.

This quiz is to make a Hangman guessing player in Ruby. Play should proceed as
follows:

	1. The program requests a word or phrase pattern, e.g. "-------".
	
	2. The program suggests a letter, or may guess the entire word or phrase.
	
	3. The user indicates which letter positions, if any, match that letter.
	   If none match, a life is lost. If six (or configurable) lives are lost,
	   the program loses.

The specification is otherwise open-ended to allow you to focus on whatever part
of the problem interests you. For example:

	* You may choose the form of user interface (e.g. terminal, GUI toolkit,
	  web).
	
	* You can just show the number of wrong guesses made, or you can actually
	  draw the hangman.
	
	* You may concentrate on improving the play, for example by using a
	  dictionary to improve the guesses made at each stage. A suitable file
	  is /usr/share/dict/words on many Linux systems.
	
	* A dynamic solution could start with an empty dictionary, and guess the
	  answer by chance. If it fails, it would prompt the user for the word
	  or phrase they were thinking of. It would add new words or phrases to
	  its dictionary so as to become a better player over time.
	
	* You could investigate ways of precomputing a hangman decision tree,
	  optimizing it for the minimum number of wrong guesses along each branch.
	  The aim is to produce an unbeatable guesser for a given dictionary.
	
	* You may wish to consider how best to decouple the UI from the guessing
	  logic, to enable different UI's to work with the same guessing engine,
	  or vice versa.