BT YOUNG SCIENTIST AND TECHNOLOGY EXHIBITION: If you want to win at the word game hangman, try "pyx". Or "buzz", "yuk" or the unexpectedly difficult word "by".
This is according to Cormac Ó Mainnín of Ballincollig Community School in Co Cork, who has developed a way to win at hangman.
The 17-year-old fifth year student carried out a computer-based analysis of letter frequency in 102,000 words taken from books, newspapers and other sources.
“I was trying to find out a strategy for winning hangman,” Cormac explained at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, which is under way at the RDS.
“I was playing hangman and wondered whether adding an S at the end of a word would make guessing it more difficult,” he said. “I first tried to find which were the difficult letters.”
His research expanded once he began to dig into the project, which began last September. He looked at the most frequent starting and finishing letters for words, finding that T starts 15 per cent of words and W starts 7 per cent. The most common finishing letters were E, T, S and D.
He soon found that there is a definite advantage of you can find short words, even common words like “by”, because failure to guess a letter forfeits a turn. Those with less commonly used letters are also a good bet, hence his discovery that the number one word to choose if you want to win is “pyx”. A pyx, by the way, is a container for holding hosts.
“If you do know about letter frequency in words, it will definitely help you,” Cormac added.
His top ten words, starting from the best, are: pyx, buzz, jug, fuzz, fuzzy, by, jump, gyp, yuk and jumpy.
Speaking at the event today, Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise Mary Coughlan said it was "particularly heartening" to see the constantly growing participation in the annual exhibition.
"Our future prosperity and well being as a society will derive from the enormous investment we are making in R&D. Empirical evidence tells us that technological progress, through its impact on production and productivity, is a key determinant of long term economic growth."