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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

#211

Post by unfocussed_mike »

dubbel wrote: post #203
wolframhempel wrote: post #199

Not directly related to the article, but I was just wondering what the best word to start wordle with is - and I think it is ATONE. I arrived there by looking at the most frequent letters in english from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency and putting them into an anagram solver at https://www.thewordfinder.com/anagram-solver/ There is no five letter word from ETAOI (the five most frequent letters) but the…

ATONE is a good one based on letter frequency - I wonder if letter position might lead you to another word, for example one that ends with "ed", "er" or "es". Or has an "e" as the second to last character? Edit: I just read in a comment, plural or past tense words seem to be less common in the Wordle word set, so my example wouldn't make as much sense.

I use STARE or TASER. Then UNLID and CHOMP :-)

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#212

Post by 3pt14159 »

dralley wrote: post #116
ehsankia wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. Absolutely. If that limitation wasn't there, the game would've definitely fizzled out within days and maybe even never made to it the popularity it has now. The slow sustained popularity, with people posting their results on the shared daily word is the key to success here. It's the only reason people are still talking about it more than a month later.

This is also why I strongly prefer the HBO release model to the Netflix model.

The HBO model works better for shows that are going to have more than one season because in the first season people haven't generally heard of it.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#213

Post by the_af »

neoberg wrote: post #207
the_af wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the full list of words being hardcoded and readily available is not a kind of elegant simplicity, but simply an inelegant compromise to get everything done client-side, which has obvious benefits. It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation.

Why tho? Cheating just takes away from the cheater's experience and doesn't affect anyone else. It's pretty much like any physical game. You can play (or cheat) it any way you like even though the game is designed to be played in a certain way.

I agree with your philosophy against cheating, but still, games must implement some sort of anticheat, just like they must implement some sort of game rules.

Imagine not implementing blocking walls in Counter Strike, "just don't walk through walls, it would make the game less fun and why would you ruin the experience for yourself like that?".

This is a case where not hiding the word list was done because it was easier to implement Wordle this way. Engineering-wise, it's not elegant, it's a cop-out.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#214

Post by koliber »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #43
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…

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:…

They could have at least thrown in a microservice or two to breathe some air into that fad.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#215

Post by jrockway »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #78
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…

When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented. After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab…

> I would never have thought of just one, shared round per day which is surely one of the critical elements of its success

It's different anyway, but how are people building routines around remembering to visit a certain website once a day? Do they just see the shares on Twitter and remember to go play themselves? Do they bookmark it? I certainly can't build a routine around a novelty like Wordle.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#216

Post by shrx »

wolframhempel wrote: post #199

Not directly related to the article, but I was just wondering what the best word to start wordle with is - and I think it is ATONE. I arrived there by looking at the most frequent letters in english from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency and putting them into an anagram solver at https://www.thewordfinder.com/anagram-solver/ There is no five letter word from ETAOI (the five most frequent letters) but the…

You can improve this guess by calculating the letter frequency for the 5-letter words only. With the dictionary that I use, the optimal word to start with is AROSE.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#217

Post by compiler-guy »

the_af wrote: post #213
neoberg wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why tho? Cheating just takes away from the cheater's experience and doesn't affect anyone else. It's pretty much like any physical game. You can play (or cheat) it any way you like even though the game is designed to be played in a certain way.

I agree with your philosophy against cheating, but still, games must implement some sort of anticheat, just like they must implement some sort of game rules. Imagine not implementing blocking walls in Counter Strike, "just don't walk through walls, it would make the game less fun and why would you ruin the experience for yourself like that?". This is a case where not hiding the word list was done because it was easie…

With Wordle, you only play against yourself, so cheating only cheats yourself. So no need for anti cheating.

Client side dictionary isn’t a cop out at all. It’s a terrific solution for a single player game that helps keep the code base elegant.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#218

Post by mym1990 »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #142
yen223 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).…

Ditto. I used Postman pre-rework and then came back and had to spend 10 minutes trying to find the page to make an actual callout. And I still can’t find it on the first try whenever I re-use the service.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#219

Post by the_af »

compiler-guy wrote: post #217
the_af wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your philosophy against cheating, but still, games must implement some sort of anticheat, just like they must implement some sort of game rules. Imagine not implementing blocking walls in Counter Strike, "just don't walk through walls, it would make the game less fun and why would you ruin the experience for yourself like that?". This is a case where not hiding the word list was done because it was easie…

With Wordle, you only play against yourself, so cheating only cheats yourself. So no need for anti cheating. Client side dictionary isn’t a cop out at all. It’s a terrific solution for a single player game that helps keep the code base elegant.

> so cheating only cheats yourself

Well, cheating is less important than in Counter Strike, but not entirely unimportant either. Playing Wordle has a social component.

I think this solution is neither elegant nor terrific. It's simply completely ignoring the problem and claiming that it doesn't matter anyway. I obviously disagree.

PS: when I was a kid, I learned programming on my C64 with BASIC. Like many kids, the first programs I wrote were "guess the thing" kind of games. Usually "guess the number", but occasionally "guess the word". Even back then I understood that hardcoding the word in the program listing was less than ideal, but I just didn't know how to do better. Let's say that 8-year old me would not have been positively impressed if told that Wordle had the "elegant" solution of storing the list of words in its source code.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#220

Post by nigma1337 »

the_af wrote: post #213
neoberg wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why tho? Cheating just takes away from the cheater's experience and doesn't affect anyone else. It's pretty much like any physical game. You can play (or cheat) it any way you like even though the game is designed to be played in a certain way.

I agree with your philosophy against cheating, but still, games must implement some sort of anticheat, just like they must implement some sort of game rules. Imagine not implementing blocking walls in Counter Strike, "just don't walk through walls, it would make the game less fun and why would you ruin the experience for yourself like that?". This is a case where not hiding the word list was done because it was easie…

Not at all the same as in counter strike, as if one person was walking through walls, it'd break it for everyone else not walking through walls.

My wordle doesn't get worse from you cheating, but my game of CS sure would.

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