Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Worldle

worldle.teuteuf.fr

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 241 posts

Re: Worldle

#111

Post by School-Cotton »

deisner wrote: post #56

When do you get a yellow square? I couldn't find this documented anywhere, so I took a look at the code. Here's what I found: For each guess, Worldle calculates a proximity score from 0 to 100 -- higher is better. Each row is basically a quantized proximity score meter, from 0 to 100 in increments of 20. If you get at least half-way to the next increment of 20 (i.e. to the next green square), you get a yellow square,…

20 million meters is indeed about the maximum distance between any two points on Earth.

Re: Worldle

#112

Post by Ansil849 »

polishdude20 wrote: post #103
function_seven wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the percentage indicate separately from the distance? I think the "right" way to display the distance would be from the closest points in the guessed and target territories. So United States and Canada, sharing a border, would be "0 km", while Canada and Mexico would be whatever the shortest path from border to border would be (like 2,000km?) I have a feeling that's a bit more difficult than centers, thoug…

But then you get Canada and you instantly know it's the USA next.

> But then you get Canada and you instantly know it's the USA next.

So in your hypothetical scenario....this hypothetical player would know that the only country Canada has a land border with is the USA, but not know what the USA looks like so as to be able to solve this without first guessing Canada?

This seems improbable to me. Chances are that if someone knows enough about a country that it's a 'single neighbor' country, or that it has a 'single neighbor' country, they will also know what the country looks like.

For example, if someone instantly knows that if they typed in Haiti it must then be the Dominican Republic, chances are very high that they wouldn't have typed Haiti because they also know what the Dominican Republic looks like. Much like chances are high that if someone knows that Canada only borders the USA, they also wouldn't have typed Canada in the first place, but would have guessed USA right away.

Re: Worldle

#114

Post by mcorning »

function_seven wrote: post #63
Ansil849 wrote: post #33

I was extremely confused about the distance values in relation to the percentages until I read the help: > The distances displayed correspond to the distances between the selected and the target territory centers. > For instance, the computed distance between United States and Canada is around 2260km even if they have a common border. That's extremely deceptive and non-obvious unless you read through the documentatio…

So what is the percentage indicate separately from the distance? I think the "right" way to display the distance would be from the closest points in the guessed and target territories. So United States and Canada, sharing a border, would be "0 km", while Canada and Mexico would be whatever the shortest path from border to border would be (like 2,000km?) I have a feeling that's a bit more difficult than centers, thoug…

It's really a shame the developer didn't add this feature. One might be scared off by the large number of geometry files involved with this, but actually this is a great example of when hard coding can supersede dynamic/robust code. It would be better to simply store an object of all countries borders and the their relative direction to one another. I could see this being a slight issue with countries that share a border with another that is many directions of their border (Lesotho and South Africa, for example), but it would still be much less deceptive than saying "the USA is 2000km south of Canada."

Re: Worldle

#115

Post by afterburner »

Galanwe wrote: post #99
numlock86 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you get it wrong, though? You are basically presented the solution. It's like if Wordle would show you the picture of a tiger and asks for the word "TIGER". And if you don't recognize a country by it's borders and just take a wild guess, something like "you are 5000km off!" probably won't help you much anyway, which is apparently what you are getting shown on a wrong guess according to comments here.

Not everyone knows the exact shape of every country.

The real problem is there's only 195 countries.

Re: Worldle

#116

Post by blendergeek »

deisner wrote: post #56

When do you get a yellow square? I couldn't find this documented anywhere, so I took a look at the code. Here's what I found: For each guess, Worldle calculates a proximity score from 0 to 100 -- higher is better. Each row is basically a quantized proximity score meter, from 0 to 100 in increments of 20. If you get at least half-way to the next increment of 20 (i.e. to the next green square), you get a yellow square,…

> Though that max distance is defined to be 20,000,000.

This is almost true (in real life). The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole. Given that the earth is a fairly "nice" sphere, the maximum distance between any two points on earth is very close to 20,000,000 meters.

Re: Worldle

#118

Post by unkulunkulu »

blendergeek wrote: post #116
deisner wrote: post #56

When do you get a yellow square? I couldn't find this documented anywhere, so I took a look at the code. Here's what I found: For each guess, Worldle calculates a proximity score from 0 to 100 -- higher is better. Each row is basically a quantized proximity score meter, from 0 to 100 in increments of 20. If you get at least half-way to the next increment of 20 (i.e. to the next green square), you get a yellow square,…

> Though that max distance is defined to be 20,000,000. This is almost true (in real life). The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole. Given that the earth is a fairly "nice" sphere, the maximum distance between any two points on earth is very close to 20,000,000 meters.

TIL, so the equator length is 40k km by definition? So cool!

Re: Worldle

#119

Post by laurent92 »

function_seven wrote: post #63
Ansil849 wrote: post #33

I was extremely confused about the distance values in relation to the percentages until I read the help: > The distances displayed correspond to the distances between the selected and the target territory centers. > For instance, the computed distance between United States and Canada is around 2260km even if they have a common border. That's extremely deceptive and non-obvious unless you read through the documentatio…

So what is the percentage indicate separately from the distance? I think the "right" way to display the distance would be from the closest points in the guessed and target territories. So United States and Canada, sharing a border, would be "0 km", while Canada and Mexico would be whatever the shortest path from border to border would be (like 2,000km?) I have a feeling that's a bit more difficult than centers, thoug…

Interesting because, between easy-and-wrong and hard-but-perfect, there is the solution of subtracting the size of each country from their distance.
Post reply on HN