Apparently there's an exploit, given all of the answers with INT_MIN guesses on the leaderboard.
Guess my word
41–50 of 60 posts
Re: Guess my word
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does. The blue word is the closest guess before and the red word is the closest guess after.
Would be nice if it indicated it in some way beyond colour-coding, for the benefit of the colour-blind and those who don't catch on.
Blue-red colorblindness?
Re: Guess my word
#43Isn't this simply a game about how to do a binary search of a dictionary? How is that exciting?
I think it's more about how difficult it can be to do a binary search of the dictionary in your head. I don't want to spoil today's word, and I've tried not to below, although there are minor spoilers. Once I started to narrow it down it became difficult to find words between my constraints. In one case I was making assumptions about what letters can come after other ones while trying to generate a new word (and bein…
I had the same experience. I locked in to the first letter within a few guesses, but then struggled to find words that began with the second letter I wanted to guess. Eventually, I realized that, since I was on my phone, I could take advantage of predictive text to help me out (okay... "cheat" is probably more accurate). I doubt that I would have figured it out on my own (due to the word being totally unrelated to the word that makes up the first few letters).
Re: Guess my word
#44 console.log(answer)Re: Guess my word
#45Fun, I quite like it. Sad that everyone has made the leaderboard unusable, but I'm sure the majority of the problem could be fixed in one or two lines of code. Looks like it only became a problem today... hacker news is living up to its name?
Re: Guess my word
#46Helped myself with some python, I guessed it in 16 tries. lines = tuple(open('english_words.txt', 'r')) min = 0; max = len(lines) while True : index = min + (max-min)//2 print lines[index]; before = raw_input("Before? y/n") if before == "y" : max = index-1 elif before == "n" : min = index+1 else : break english_words.txt can be downloaded here: http://www.mieliestronk.com/corncob_lowercase.txt
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Re: Guess my word
#47Good stuff! I started playing it zoomed way in on my phone and had no idea the previous guesses and bracketing words were shown. Remembering recent words while thinking of new ones made for a nice "n-back" sort of challenge.
Re: Guess my word
#48"My word is after noon."
Re: Guess my word
#49Isn't this simply a game about how to do a binary search of a dictionary? How is that exciting?
I think it's more about how difficult it can be to do a binary search of the dictionary in your head. I don't want to spoil today's word, and I've tried not to below, although there are minor spoilers. Once I started to narrow it down it became difficult to find words between my constraints. In one case I was making assumptions about what letters can come after other ones while trying to generate a new word (and bein…
Almost the same experience here.
I think more important than a word cloud of guesses would be the progression of words to see people's thought process (dictionary vs conceptual).
And I'm not ashamed at all that I started with "monkey" after all, M is the 13th letter. ;)
Re: Guess my word
#50What a shame - a cute toy, and people just break it.
This is why we can't have nice things - remind me never to show HN anything that's just a bit of fun. Some people really will set the world on fire just to see if they can, and then just to watch it burn.
It's not what hacking used to be about. It used to be about making cool stuff, and people sharing and appreciating it. Now even the simplest of toys need to be bullet-proof and hardened.
I miss the old days.