THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I am totally going to beat my wife now - she usually creams me!

huh, that’s interesting.  I never drew the scaffold, either.  How common is that?

We always began with the structure entirely built, and just made the hung man more complex.

I will save this link for the next time I am trying to explain why Mathematica is my favorite toy.

#1

Your post reminds me of the time Mike Schmidt was in the broadcast booth with Harry Kalas during a Phillies game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKpEYMHAaOw

Harry Kalas: “...Michael Jack, how’s your golf game?”

Mike Schmidt: “Pretty good, Harry. I’ve been beating the hell out of my wife pretty regularly.”

*awkward laughter*

Harry Kalas: At golf, I hope. At golf, I hope.

favorite word for hangman is xylem

I didn’t think that was useless sh!t at all - got my intellectual juices flowing in fact.

It was a really good backdrop to show how one would arrive at a Nash equilibrium.

I was thinking that the best way to get there would be to have two competing programs play each other - one’s the guesser and one’s the keeper (what would you call the non-guesser anyway?).

Both programs would use the same dictionary and the guesser would guess the most likely letters while the keeper would try to think of a word with the least likely letters. At that point the algorithms would begin to converge since the less used letters will be picked more often by the keeper.

I wonder if the equilibrium result would be that all the letters would be weighted close to the same. The rarer a letter is the more often it would get picked by the keeper resulting in the guesser using all letters equally.

This makes sense when playing against a guessing computer, but my experience when playing with people is that they’ll usually change strategy after the first few guesses, thinking you’re trying to game them with a word with x, q, j, z, etc. I’ve found the best choices are things with the uncommon but not rare letters, like b, g, w, v. Gobble is one of my favorite words to use.

#5

Thank gosh the context needed was already provided by the article!

I like to use “flax”.

Generally I use 3-4 letter words only.