On aggregate and comparison functions for Motus/Lingo playing

Abstract

Motus (Lingo) is a TV show based on a word game where each player has to guess a word, of which she knows only the length and the first letter. To do this, the player makes different proposals and she is given some hints based on the positions of the letters. We first show in this article that there is no strategy to find all the words with the available number of proposals. Next, we study different strategies based on aggregate functions and tie-breaks. All these strategies were tested on all the 5 to 10 letter French words, which finally leads us to discuss the respective performance of these strategies. We show that the criteria of average number of tries used, worst case and number of fails are conflicting.