Jenny's Noodle

Image created via Hangman.no

The winning strategy for the paper and pencil guessing game Hangman has been solved. Well, sort of. Now that the ultimate maneuver has hit the internet, you only have a small window of time to play the game and stump your friends with it before the world catches on.

So what's the hardest word to choose as the solution to a game of Hangman? Drum roll please...

Jazz! Ba-dum-bum-psh.

Prompted by a question from his six-year-old daughter, a researcher named Jon McLoone built a computer game that used a series of algorithms to solve 15 million Hangman games.

"Having gathered all this data on 90,000 words, McLoone selected the 1,000 most promising, and then ran the game 3,000 times using just those thousand. All said and done, McLoone 'played' nearly 8 million games of Hangman in order to determine that the hardest Hangman word to guess - regardless of whether the guesser has 8, 9, 10, or even up to 13 guesses, is 'jazz.'"

The conclusion seems logical - nobody ever guesses "J" or "Z". Except maybe this guy.

[via Now I Know]