From Ken Jennings: "When I was a kid, I remember my brother beat me once at Battleship by simply refusing to put his ships anywhere on his grid. Makes it a lot harder, as you can imagine. And it’s a neat Gordian-knot way to win.I was wondering: is there a similar way to cheat at Hangman? Can you mentally switch words as the other player is guessing, in such a way that they can’t win?
The answer’s yes. Off the top of my head, one good family of words to choose is _ A _ _ L E. The other player will immediately get the E and the A. Let’s be generous and give them the L as well. But then you can decide the word is BABBLE, CACKLE, GAGGLE, WAFFLE, or DAZZLE–all words with no common consonants–depending on what letter the player guesses now. In fact, ?a??le words are pretty good choices in honest Hangman as well, for the same reason. Too many options for the other play to guarantee they’ll get to them all before their man expires."
It's amazing that we know so much about this little puzzle. It's amazing not only that we can solve it, which is hard enough, but that we even have figured out the theoretically best possible way to solve.
Give the human race a problem, challenge, puzzle or anything and somebody, somewhere is going to manage it eventually, no matter how difficult or how trivial. It may take years, it might take massive collaboration, but d*** it we're going to do it.
Come to think of it you might need to define "in existence" too. Aristotle's poetics of comedy, or say love's labors won probably won't quite make the cut as "existing" but I'm sure there are some good grey area examples.
From Ken Jennings: "When I was a kid, I remember my brother beat me once at Battleship by simply refusing to put his ships anywhere on his grid. Makes it a lot harder, as you can imagine. And it’s a neat Gordian-knot way to win.I was wondering: is there a similar way to cheat at Hangman? Can you mentally switch words as the other player is guessing, in such a way that they can’t win?
The answer’s yes. Off the top of my head, one good family of words to choose is _ A _ _ L E. The other player will immediately get the E and the A. Let’s be generous and give them the L as well. But then you can decide the word is BABBLE, CACKLE, GAGGLE, WAFFLE, or DAZZLE–all words with no common consonants–depending on what letter the player guesses now. In fact, ?a??le words are pretty good choices in honest Hangman as well, for the same reason. Too many options for the other play to guarantee they’ll get to them all before their man expires."
Give the human race a problem, challenge, puzzle or anything and somebody, somewhere is going to manage it eventually, no matter how difficult or how trivial. It may take years, it might take massive collaboration, but d*** it we're going to do it.
D work just fine for coworkers who know who you are.