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where you have to guess your opponent's five-letter word before he guesses yours. This is
done by offering other five-letter words with a response of from 0 to 5, depending on the
jots, or common letters in the secret word and the word guessed. If no letters are in
common, the response is 0. If one is, the response is 1. For multiple occurrences of a
letter, it's a one-to-one match. For example, if the secret word happens to be eerie ,
guesses of means and level would result in 1 and 2 jots respectively. JOTTO uses a
dictionary of about 1800 words. I had two separate games, one in which you guessed the
computer's word and the other had the machine guessing yours - no cheating, please. The
former wasn't too exciting but the other is the one I'll concentrate on here. In that
approach, the computer could usually figure out the player's word in eight guesses or less.
My strategy aimed at reducing the size of matrix of words as quickly as possible
by eliminating any word that couldn't possibly be the secret word. If the computer
guessed a word with no letters in common, any word having any of those five letters
would be discarded. If 3 was the response, any word without all three of those letters
word would be tossed away as well. At the beginning of guessing, I had four words that
the computer could choose from - all having different letters - hoping for a few 0 replies.
This would really shrink the matrix of words. As you can imagine, it was a great strategy.
The other game was Score Four, three-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe - almost. The
more common game is 3 by 3, but this is 4 by 4 by 4, except that either player only had a
maximum of 16 moves at any given time. There were 64 beads with holes so that they
could be plopped down on 16 different thin poles, always dropping down as far as
possible. Each pole held 4 beads and you could win the game by 4 in a row (length, width
or height) or diagonally. The latter had 20 possibilities - you had to be on your guard. The
strategy I used for the computer was 1) look for any move that produced a win and if
there, end the game 2) look for any move that needed to be made to avoid losing on the
opponent's next move and take action and 3) make some offensive move. The program
was quite good at suddenly coming up with victory. It didn't lose very often. In either
game, I avoided heuristic strategies.
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