Evil Hangman

Programming

Hello, this time I'll talk about programming. Those who studies math here had a full year of object-oriented programming with C++. I liked it a lot and took a module "Data structures" where we program in JAVA. Now I can choose on an assignment from various sources and I'm thinking of doing Evil Hangman.

Evil Hangman

Evil Hangman is an assignment in which students write a computer program that cheats at the classic game Hangman. Normally, when writing a computer to play Hangman, the computer picks a single word and accurately represents it as the human player tries to guess all of the letters in the word. In Evil Hangman, the computer instead maintains a list of every word in the English language, then continuously pares down the word list to try to dodge the player's guesses as much as possible. Human players tend to fare terribly against this conniving silicon foe!

I've already made a little program that fetched up all Lithuanian words from a website and I believe that if I do it right, this can be unbeatable. Especially since there are some Lithuanian words that are really tough to guess.

Tips

Since I'm not that much experienced at programming I'll appreciate all tips that might aid me at this assignment. Maybe someone has done this. Feedback in the comments would be great.

Some poker math

So I've tried playing and studying some Pot limit Omaha poker, I've quite enjoyed this format and that encouraged me to dwelve more into it. So I made some calculations on some specific hands and the results surprised me. In my given scenario KQ89 prefers to call the flop and JJ34 prefers to get it in on the flop even if he's got 45% chance to win if he does.

Here are the calculations: 

I've rounded up some values but everything else should be quite accurate.





















Player 1 has a 20 out wrap and Player 2 has a bare top set. The pot on flop is 10bb
After the flop, effective remaining stack is 40bb.
I analyzed 3 situations:1st situation: Players get it all in on flop
When Player 1 calls a pot bet on flop it breaks down into two more situations
I analyzed a few outcomes on turn:
-a) Board pairs up and player 1 is drawing dead therefore he folds.
-b) Turn bricks and Player 2 bets pot, both players are flipping.
-c) Player 1 hits and is the favorite to win, so he bets pot and Player 2 folds.
-d) Player 1 hits and is the favorite to win, so he bets pot and Player 2 calls.
so there's 2 more situations , 2nd situation = a+b+c and 3rd situation = a+b+d
Ofc there's more possible situations but those rely a lot on the players behavior so I just analyzed these.

Assuming both players are very straightforward no money gets in on the river since one player has 100% equity and will take down the pot.

EV -> the EV of the 1st situation.
EV1 -> the EV of the 2nd situation.
EV2 -> the EV of the 3rd situation.

The second example also includes a flush, So I added another situation if Player 2 folds only if the turn brings a flush.(EV3)

Of course this poker hand is only theoretical, opponents' tendencies is very important and you can never know his exact range. Using bigger stacks would change the results and it might be that against some opponents it would be better to get it in on the flop(e.g. against the very aggressive ones against which you won't know what hand you're against)

After a break

Hello everyone,

So I've just stopped blogging long time ago, I remember that exams got up to me and I just didn't have much time or interesting stuff to write about. I've had a fun summer, relaxed quite a bit and the second year of studying began.

Studies.That's one major thing in my life at the moment and I'm doing better I guess. I still can't make myself productive enough, that's what bothers me the most I guess. But on the bright side, studies don't seem to be that hard this term. My goal is to rock the grades out of it and get a scholarship, it's quite hard but I know I've got the potential to do so I just need to stop being a lazy ass.

So studies, they've gotten far more interesting and perhaps will deserve more space in this blog.

That's it for now, wait for a post on an interesting subject soon :)