Information theory
Information theory articles on the Math Mental blog, with worked examples solved step by step.
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The math of five-letter word games: counting, odds and bits
There are 26 to the 5th power, or 11,881,376, five-letter strings, but the game only accepts a short list of real words. With N equally likely candidates, a blind guess wins with probability 1/N. A good guess splits the list into small, balanced groups: the expected number of remaining candidates is the sum of the squared group sizes divided by N, and the information you gain, measured in bits, comes from a base-2 logarithm.
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