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Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

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Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#141

Post by dvirsky »

pdpi wrote: post #128
dvirsky wrote: post #19

The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…

> No cookies are involved in making you play one game per day The game does, however, use local storage to keep your score, and progress along today’s puzzle.

Sure, what I meant is that even if you delete your cookies you'll play the same round.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#142

Post by shortstuffsushi »

yen223 wrote: post #57
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work. I hope it inspires future devs to let go of feeling like they absolutely need to beg or require users to create accounts to capture email addresses just so they have a chance at monetizing their thing. Wordle may not have ever caught on if it were preemptively over-engineered:…

I wish I were smart enough to coin a catchy phrase that means "the moment some software dropped in quality, when they decided to add user accounts", because I see this quite a lot. I'm looking at you, Postman!

This actually hurt to read, having used Postman since its launch. It was such a great, simple product then with a simple premise - easily make http requests from a simple ui. Since then, feature after feature has been added, now it's just total bloatware cruft, to the point where after having taken a break for several years, I found it relatively difficult to use upon return (especially if you want to avoid sign up). I see they've recently gotten a series d (!?) of $225 million, so good for them I guess, but it's not something I almost ever use any more, and no longer feel drawn to...

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#144

Post by 4gotunameagain »

np_tedious wrote: post #137
danachow wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They removed it from the master dictionary as well.

*primary dictionary

hahah I bet you were advocating of removing master from git as well?

That's just silly. And virtue signaling.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#145

Post by EdwardDiego »

ehsankia wrote: post #93
EdwardDiego wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On #1 - humph was hard for me, I've never encountered it in my reading (maybe I'm not reading a particular genre that uses it? Is it something Jane Austen used?), only got it via a a last ditch guess, because I'm familiar with "harrumph" and I had "-umph" already and "h" was the only prefix that remotely made any kind of sense.

The wordlist definitely isn't perfect, and obviously each person has their own vocabulary, but it still is a key. It's something the creator mentions, if on your first play you run into a stupid word, you probably won't come back the next day. And the fact that the current word list is 1/th the total word count goes to show how many words are ridiculous. AFAIK his partner actually sifted through all 13k word list and…

That's interesting, I suspect a lot of Wordle's success derives from their curation of words to remove things like "abaft" and "imago".

But then I see the NYT went and removed words like "caulk" and "agora" because they were "obscure", and I feel better about humph.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#146

Post by suzzer99 »

bsimpson wrote: post #104
dvirsky wrote: post #19

The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…

I forgot to play one day, so at just after midnight, I set my TZ to Hawaii to catch up. After I finished, I set it back to PST. When I went to play the next day's game, it acted like I had already solved the puzzle at midnight. I had to manually edit localStorage to fix my state (or presumably skip a game). This was when it was still hosted on Josh's site, but be weary of changing TZs to get other day's puzzles. The…

Yeah I had the same thing happen. I would jump ahead two hours to play it at night. This morning it kept showing me the same 3-day-old game, no matter what I did. I had to clean out cache, local storage, cookies and everything to finally get it to start playing again.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#148

Post by suzzer99 »

dionidium wrote: post #124

In addition to everything else already discussed — the game is really well done, the sharing feature is inspired, the animations are delightful, etc — the thing about Wordle that makes it so universally popular is that it’s a very easy game that is experientially difficult. You have 6 guesses of 5 letters. There are only 26 letters in the English alphabet. Anyone in the top few deciles of verbal ability should hardly…

I've lost when I got into a situation with three green letters, no yellow letters, and a ton of valid words remaining with the other 2 slots. Can happen with one open slot too.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#149

Post by jgtrosh »

Biganon wrote: post #139

My friends and I love Wordle. I made a Discord bot that picks a random French word every day at 8 AM and 8 PM, and we guess it in the chat. I added a rule so that you can't make two guesses in a row, in other words players must take turns making guesses, so one person cannot just brute force the game immediately. We don't limit ourselves to 5 letter words, and it's really fun when the word is very long. Sometimes it…

That's a good idea!

Of course, there's no easy way to share it with other people, since it has to be on a shared medium. For anyone else looking for a >5 letter French worldle, check out SUTOM [1]; it took me a while to try it out but the long words are a nice change and the motus sounds are delightful.

Please look again into libreoffice dic files, they're plain ASCII with a number of entries in the first line and you can probably s#/.*## the end of the lines (or maybe expand to include the alternate endings, as you wish).

[1]: https://sutom.nocle.fr/

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#150

Post by jdrc »

> but not in an annoying way like Farmville Facebook notifications. Shared Wordle games actively improve your experience by adding a social factor.

It's no different than any other social games. It's still novel, so people don't call it annoying ... yet

I like the idea of sharing everywhere with a picture or emojis, because it means the game has no archive or hall of fame, which means users are incentivized to store it in their social media, which made it more viral. IT's a clever way to escape the limitations of social media platforms. But OTOH without archive or some long-term goal most people will find it pointless and give up soon.

The article seems to imply that wordle is the first game that did all those things. That's not true, each of those elements has been done before, but this game does contain a combination of them.

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