THE HANGMAN GAME

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Hangman is a paper and pencil guessing game for two or more players. One player
thinks of a word and the other tries to guess it by suggesting the letters. The word to
guess is represented by a row of dashes, giving the number of letters. If the guessing
player suggests a letter which occurs in the word, the program writes it in all its
correct positions. If the suggested letter does not occur in the word, the other player
draws one element of the hangman diagram as a tally mark. The game is over when:

The guessing player completes the word, or guesses the whole word correctly.

HOW TO PLAY

Our code will generate a word which has to be guessed by the player. So, at the
output screen will exist marked out blanks (short lines) for each letter of a word. Then
the player will guess a letter. If that letter is in the word(s) then the project will write
the letter at everyplace it appears, and cross out that letter in the alphabet. If the
letter isn't in the word then we cross out the lifelines (which are usually a finite no. of
chances) from the list. The player will continue guessing the letters until he can either
solve the word (or phrase) or he will end up losing all the lifelines and he will be
declared a LOSER.
So, it is basically a TWO PLAYER game. But in my project a single player plays the
game and the rules are strictly followed by the programme.

THE STRATEGY OF THE GAME - GOALS and DELIVERABLES

In the English language, the 12 most commonly occurring letters in descending order
are: e-t-a-o-i-n-s-h-r-d-l-u. This and other letter-frequency lists are used by the
guessing player to increase the odds when it is their turn to guess. On the other hand,
the same lists can be used by the puzzle setter to stump their opponent by choosing a
word which deliberately avoids common letters or one that contains rare letters.
Another common strategy is to guess vowels first, as English only has six vowels
(a,e,i,o,u, and y), and almost every word has at least one.

Thus the user wins if he can guess the word or else he is a loser. In this programming
assignment I intend to implement the user interface by which the code takes input as
letters of the word and checks for its presence. Also another task is to reduce the no.
of chances (lifelines) one by one as the user keeps on guessing incorrect letters.

My mini project will obviously illustrate the above mentioned task, and if time
permits I even intend to enhance the GUI front end by adding some more buttons,
message box, and labels.

SOLUTION DESIGN

The gaming code will mainly contain the class Hangman which will provide the list of
good letters as well as the no. of chances given to a user. I am planning to use skinter
toolkit for GUI. Incorporation of some widgets will better the result screen, so that,
the user can proceed in the game with no confusion. The overall architecture can be
thought of having four main parts which consist of the following functionalities:-

1) Formulating a word list (with or without a hint) and store them in a data structure
with the list of all 26 alphabets of English Language.

2) The actual method which does the logical reasoning, whether the letter exists or
not, if yes, write it down at all the places else strike off a lifeline. This forms the main
part of the code.

3) Final word to be displayed if guessed wrongly else, interactive message saying that
"The Player is the winner"

4) Finally, the GUI coding, user interactive screen which will mainly prevail during the
code output.

I am using the glib and gtk+ libraries which are already available. Also planning to
utilize the built in classes and submodules of skinter toolkit as and when required.

IMPLEMENTATION PLAN

I have decided to use PYTHON language and specifically Tkinter toolkit for the GUI
package. Initially I was confused between Tkinter and wxpython, as python itself is
very new to me. But then, thought of utilizing the classes and modules of this
package for my gaming environment. This game will mainly play with the 26 letters of
the English language, so my input data will be just letters and as output the player
comes to know whether he has won, or else if lost, what the word which he missed to
guess correctly was. Thus, there will be a list of words in store with the program from
which a player will be asked to guess a word. My estimated lines of code is 200 but it
may be little more depending upon how much well I can program. I need 2 weeks’
time for the project as I am new to python and specially GUI code .Currently I have
only done some homework about what my project will do , exactly what it will
accomplish ,but I am yet to start with coding. I hope and will try my best to complete
it before the scheduled deadline.

TESTING/EVALUATION PLAN

For this particular game, there will not be any specific test case except that, I will have
to check whether the code works correctly or not for the words which are to be
guessed. Also, by giving wrong letters more than the number of chances, the user is
declared the loser.
For example:-

Word: _AN__AN
Guess: H
Misses: e,i,o,s,t

Word: HAN__AN
Guess: R
Misses: e,i,o,s,t

Word: HAN__AN
Guess: N/A
Misses: e,i,o,r,s,t

Guesser loses - the answer was HANGMAN.

Context
Hangman Game Strategies
The most common used English letter is 'e' so one better starts by guessing it. The 4
other vowels ('a', 'o', 'i', 'u') are next popular after 'e'. The other most commonly used
letters are 't', 'n', 's', 'h', 'r', 'd' and 'l'.
Using these letter can give one better odds for guessing the word, but they can also
decrease the level of fun while playing and not necessarily will help one win, but
words that are less common like "rhythm" don't qualify for this strategy.
Utility of Hangman Games
Hangman is used often by teachers to practice spelling, vocabulary and just for fun.
The most popular way to play hangman games offline is to draw blank letters for the
chosen word on a paper or on the blackboard and let the players guess the letters.
For each incorrect guess, another part of the man is drawn. If the picture is complete
before the word is revealed the hangman game is lost and the character is hanged, if
the word is revealed before the execution the game is won.

JUSTIFICATION

The hangman game illustrates how much with discretion one can make the best
choice at each stage ... strategies rely on obligations being fulfilled in the future
(player strives to win). I picked up this topic as it was a simple but prudent game to
check the intuition and tactics of a player in guessing the word in very less time. It
subtly judges the efficient thought process of the player well. In the perspective of
coding also, I feel it was a proper project for me to experience python GUI for the first
time.

FUTURE SCOPE AND EXTENSIONS OF THE PROJECT

This game can have varied applications in the context of word formations and puzzles.
Its knowledge can be valuable to many other games like CROSSWORD PUZZLES,
WHEEL OF FORTUNE, and SCRABBLE. We can also have an investigation of very
popular and commonly used letters in most of the words. Make a frequency
distribution in graph out of it. The underlying mathematical concepts are Data
Collection and Analysis, Presentation and Interpretation which can have lot of
implications in language processing and study of graphs and testing conjectures. Also,
we can find out that the most popular letter in the English language is "e". The letter
frequency of all letters in the English language is: e t a o i n s r h l d c u m f p g w y b v
k x j q z.

REFERENCE

https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~anwesha/cs699/mpStage1.html