I want a new Worldle!!!
Seriously. How do you get a fresh one?
You wait a day. (Although there are various workarounds.)
Worldle
211–220 of 241 posts
Re: Worldle
#212What are good resources for learning geography?
Sporcle has a trove of geography quizzes. I'm quite proud of myself for acing the all countries quiz.
https://www.sporcle.com/games/category/geography?sortBy=allt...
Here is a quiz that replicates Worldle:
https://www.sporcle.com/games/Ian6320/countries-by-shape---w...
Re: Worldle
#213Re: Worldle
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
TIL, so the equator length is 40k km by definition? So cool!
Almost but no. Today all the SI base units are defined in terms of a universal constant, so that if you understood how SI works you can do all the same metrication work from a distant galaxy, you don't need to be here on Earth. The metre is defined by the constant c, the "speed of light" But because of this original definition the equator will work out to about 40000 km.
“The Mapmakers Wife” is an interesting book that tells the story of how explorers measured arcs of latitude and longitude around the world to figure all this out. The audiobook version is good too.
Re: Worldle
#215I 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…
If you get a ‘country that’s 2000 km north of the USA’ and do not guess Canada (the ‘only’ country north of the US) then I don’t know what to say.
And you could presumably say the same thing about any other two countries, yes?
Re: Worldle
#216I 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…
To be fair, Wordle also doesn't require much external knowledge beyond a basic vocabulary. This is aimed at a more narrow crowd and is just a fun experiment.
I think Wordle requires a pretty extensive vocabulary to be played successfully. Though you could say the same thing about Worldle: it doesn't require much external knowledge beyond basic geography.
Re: Worldle
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!
The meridian is 40,000 km, by original definition. Trace any great circle through both poles (any pair of antipodal meridians, such as 0° and 180°) and that is 40k km.
The equator is more than that because of the oblateness of the spheroid.
And nowadays, the meter is defined in terms of natural units (time and the speed of light) in a way to be compatible with the original definition by the meridian.
Re: Worldle
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't that make countries like the USA and Canada extremely far apart because they are both large countries? The distance you would get is the distance from Hawaii to somewhere on the northeastern edge of Nunavut/Newfoundland/Labrador
Not quite, you'd get the maximum distance from the extreme end of one territory to the nearest point of the other.
> Not quite, you'd get the maximum distance from the extreme end of one territory to the nearest point of the other.
But which country do you pick the extreme edge of, and which country do you pick the nearest point of? For example, if measuring USCanada, do you pick the extreme end of Canada or the extreme end of the US?
Re: Worldle
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. But to perform that precomputation, you have to find a database of country geometry outlines. And (manually?) filter out things like Hawaii and Guam from these. Then, assuming country geometry is given as lat lon polygons, it seems you then are computing either O(n^2 * m^2) distances where n is the number of countries and m is the average number of vertices per country. Or you might come up with some space part…
Oh, good point. Getting an SVG of the world and just brute forcing every country would be near instant.
Hmm. What issue might you encounter trying to solve this problem using an SVG?
Re: Worldle
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, Wordle also doesn't require much external knowledge beyond a basic vocabulary. This is aimed at a more narrow crowd and is just a fun experiment.
I think Wordle requires a pretty extensive vocabulary to be played successfully. Though you could say the same thing about Worldle: it doesn't require much external knowledge beyond basic geography.
For Wordle, a decent vocabulary and also some intuition about letter frequency, the likelihood of letter combinations in various positions, etc. For this "basic geography" I guess but that would include knowing the names and approximate locations of some fairly obscure and not distinctive looking countries. (That said, if I cared enough to do so, I could probably bone up on my geography for a couple hours and I could probably do better.