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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

#251

Post by sangnoir »

the_af wrote: post #219
compiler-guy wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> Playing Wordle has a social component.

...and it's trust model extends there too. It copies your "Achievements" into your paste buffer and you paste them to share. One could easily edit their results, but they'd be cheating themselves too. There's not need for technical restrictions on a player ruining their own satisfaction.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#252

Post by sangnoir »

the_af wrote: post #234
nigma1337 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Replace Counter Strike with a single player FPS then. "I don't need to implement wall blocking, the player should just refrain from walking through walls". It's not elegant, it's lazy.

> Replace Counter Strike with a single player FPS then.

Single player games included cheatcodes hard-coded in them since forever. Those that didn't had "trainers" which fiddled with game memory with the same effect. Howver, invincibility and infinite ammo tend to ruin the game for most people.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#253

Post by robbiep »

mango7283 wrote: post #194
robbiep wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ooh interesting - thanks! running from the same seed do you think, or a list that will iterate in a consistent manner across other users?

It's a hardcoded list, the NYT removed some words but didn't change the rest, so "old wordle" is just a few words behind "NYT wordle"

Ahh thanks! Unfortunately I upgraded to a new phone last night and have now lost it…

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#254

Post by cookie_monsta »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #197
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.

Pretty inevitable, though; there are some letter groups in english that make that unavoidable. I use this (the second table). https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfr... I memorised STARE/TASER, UNLID, CHOMP (all the letters with more than 3% incidence, in a word order with a good letter distribution close enough to the statistical one, and some useful letter groups) and the remaining significant…

I keep in mind that OTHER NAILS contains the most common letters, but I play in hard mode and don't use either of those as a start word. My second guesses onwards are made up of clues shown and letters from those two words.

I don't understand the fun in playing easy mode and laying down words just to eliminate letters. I see a lot of people saying that it guarantees them a win in 4 moves, but once I adopted the above strategy I regularly started getting 2s and 3s. Four for me seems just ok, no big deal. At five I start making excuses/blaming the injustices of the game.

... and today I got a 5, so I will be signing the NYT petition, plus my elbow hurts /s

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#255

Post by compiler-guy »

the_af wrote: post #233
Linosaurus wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think cheating would matter if there was individual words tied to an account. But not when the design says every browser session on the planet gets the same word.

Fair enough, but then it's not an "elegant" decision we should be in awe of (as in the title "Wordle is pretty damn smart"). It's just the default of "I decided not to tackle this problem because it's hard and not a priority for my design". This was also what I defaulted to with my C64 BASIC games when I was a kid, "I don't know how to hide this, so I won't".

Rather, the conclusion is, "I don't _need_ to hide these, so I won't."

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#256

Post by EdwardDiego »

mango7283 wrote: post #184
EdwardDiego wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The NYT notably didn't add words to the list, but a surprising number of people complain they ruined it by adding "obscure" words like "tacit", "swill" and "caulk". Tbh I can understand never encountering caulk and swill somehow because never did diy or indulge in pig farming or fantasy, but I kinda would have expected "tacit acceptance" to be a common enough phrase if one reads newspapers...

In my country, "swill" is more associated with drinking alcohol these days, due to a misguided attempt at moderating drinking: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/the-six-oclock-swill-begins

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#258

Post by dvirsky »

mmcnl wrote: post #248
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.

Every design decision is a compromise. "Inelegant" is simply another word for "I would've done in it a different way".

I would have done most of this in a different way, but looking at how this guy solved all those problems made me really stop and think about how I approach problems, and I actually think he did it in a more elegant way that I would have.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#259

Post by TeaVMFan »

Rayhem wrote: post #237
TeaVMFan wrote: post #15

Having implemented my own 5-letter word game, I can agree that much finesse lies under the covers. Wordii is for the impatient, letting you play more often if you choose: https://frequal.com/wordii/ The many subtleties of this genre make it a great programming challenge. I encourage developers to try making their own version. I think you'll come away with a healthy respect for Mr. Wardle.

I just played and failed, only to get "Sorry, the word was GIBBY" with a link to the "definition" of GIBBY[1] on dictionary.com. Spoiler alert: according to dictionary.com, GIBBY isn't a word. [1]: https://www.dictionary.com/misspelling?term=GIBBY

I have removed it, thank you.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#260

Post by paulcole »

cdelsolar wrote: post #230
paulcole wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 )

Ha, yeah we definitely know some of the same people. I remember that Phoenix Biltmore being so expensive I shared a room with like 7 other 25-year old guys for the week. Was a really great time. Some of the after hours anagrams games blew my mind.

Eddie L. at the Portland club got me into distance running and that’s been my main hobby the past decade or so. I’ve gotten really into the NYT Crossword and Spelling Bee, too.

I’ll check out the site!

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