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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

#221

Post by Morizero »

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…

In some ways it reminds me of Twitter - the innovation was in restricting the content, not in adding more features.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#222

Post by RegBarclay »

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…

I try to use words that hit the Wheel of Fortune RSTLNE letters - BEAST, RUSTY, ROAST. It's served me pretty well. I haven't had to go beyond the 5th guess yet and commonly solve it in 4.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#223

Post by julianwachholz »

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:…

Removing any friction for new users or players is such a huge deal, more sites should embrace this approach. Similar to how Facebook created ghost users for everyone, why not make this explicit? There are a number of plugins for popular web frameworks that create temporary user accounts for each visitor, allowing them to use the site just like a regular user. This way it's a bit more sophisticated than plain old sessions which allows it to be integrated in existing sites as well.

And if the visitor abandons the site their data will just be garbage-collected after a while.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#224

Post by nnoitra »

wesleywt wrote: post #174
nnoitra wrote: post #172

Yet another flappy bird kind of a thing that caught on. It seems pretty boring to me and I don't wonder at all why I didn't have this idea first. It's pretty much a crossword variation.

Salty is a five letter word.

I mean I see it the same way as 2048. I don't think it's anything super-interesting and it's just something that has caught on.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#225

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

jrockway wrote: post #215
hombre_fatal wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My wife and I have made it part of our morning routine to play it while we drink our coffee.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#226

Post by toss1 »

>>Some people say the biggest difference between an engineer and a senior engineer is not on the code they write, but on the senior engineer ability to figure out ways to not write code.

YES!!

The thing I spent the most time on when coding was to avoid writing code.

* All code takes longer to run than the no-op

* The greatest performance/speed gains are not from optimizing, but from entirely eliminating chunks of code.

* All code is habitat for bugs, the more habitat, the more...

* More code can unnecessarily obfuscate the structure of the app, and ability to reason about it

Some time later, the same principle came up in a seemingly very different field of sportscar racing, when my driving coach asked me "What are the things you do that slow the car down?". I thought of some mistakes I was making, but he pointed me to the big basics - "turning and braking", followed by discussion that the most basic thing to do was to avoid turning and braking. Now obviously, some of both will be needed as soon as you approach the end of the starting straight — the point is to do only the absolute minimum, and that often takes a LOT of work to figure out how to NOT do something.

Same applies for writing code - avoid it at all costs, and write only the absolutely required minimum.

It is effort well spent

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#227

Post by sloucher »

IgorPartola wrote: post #196

What has been driving me a little nuts about it is the amount of luck involved with getting the word in a few tries. I can reliably get the word in 4 tries give or take. But when you hit something equivalent to *AR you can guess BAR, CAR, PAR, MAR, TAR, JAR, FAR, etc. The number of times I got 4 out of 5 letters on the second try just to finally get the word on the 5th or 6th try feels like I am cheated of a victory.

I started playing an Wordle-like app to get around the one-per-day limitation (I know, sue me), and played probably dozens of rounds per day. I ended up with a simple strategy of always starting with the same 3 words: LAUGH, DIRTY, JOKES which cover all the vowels (and y) and put an S at the end where it's most likely to be found. Generally I can "waste" the first 3 guesses on those words and still find the solution.

Then one day, I typed LAUGH and got 5 greens on the first line! Had to happen eventually, but still...

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#228

Post by maupin »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #181
ollifi wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

caulk was the word last week though? Nobody I play the game with knew that word. Granted we are not native english speakers. Too hard word every now and then is also unifying experience when everybody stops hating the player and instead hates the game.

Fair point. Caulk might also be more of a British English word than American English word.

It's a common word as far as I, an American, knew. But then again my dad was handy around the house and we always had tubes of caulking around.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#229

Post by whatarethembits »

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.

Strongly disagree on this assertion. Each to their own, so I'm not going to pretend that we're having an objective discussion here to start with :P. Personally the wordle model works for, something like wordle, but doesn't extend much further. I lose interest in a story fairly quickly if slowly drip fed over weeks and months. As a result I have watched FAR more shows after Netflix model than before it; I suspect I'm not the only one. I will wait until all episodes are released first to even start watching now; but often, don't continue with shows with HBP release model at all and move on to something else. The entire point of a story (for me atleast) is to get sucked into a different world and find out more while your mind is engaged. The "pay off" waiting a week to find the next bit of information is far less than the friction of first, abruptly being thrown off your train of thought, and secondly, to start caring about the story a few moments before or as the next episode is being played. Its like chasing a deep bug in the weeds of legacy code base and then suddenly having to have to switch context for a week and then told to chase that bug again. Even if I find it next time, there's no satisfaction anymore.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#230

Post by cdelsolar »

paulcole wrote: post #95
ghaff wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. Although I can program I’ve basically ended up as someone who can do fairly in-depth technical writing among many other things. And I’m not generally a word puzzle fan.

I can’t program but for awhile I wrote for a living. I was an English major in college and got hooked on Scrabble after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a sportswriter from The Wall Street Journal. I’d always been into gambling and games with a luck factor like poker, backgammon, cribbage, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Always hated chess because the better player (nearly) always wins. Scrabble…

come back to tourney Scrabble! I see that we almost overlapped and played in the Phoenix nationals but different divisions. I was addicted until Feb 2020, then the pandemic started, so we made a site to let us play online tournaments (https://woogles.io)
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