Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A word game I built to understand semantic distance

celestineplawrence.itch.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: A word game I built to understand semantic distance

#11

Post by alacritas0 »

mmastrac wrote: post #8

I really want to like games like this, but it's not really clear from the UI what direction you should be going. There's a list of suggestions, but I guess that's just a starting point? And a few words in it just ended the game. The previous versions of this game were _okay_, but semantic similarity is so fuzzy and the UIs just don't work for this yet. The intro is super cool tho, kudos for that.

I don't know if you have already played it, but https://contexto.me/ is probably the best UI I've seen for semantic word guessing games. It is simple enough that it can fit on a phone screen and only displays the rank of previous guesses in a bar that fills up more on guesses that are closer

Re: A word game I built to understand semantic distance

#13

Post by Ukv »

FireInsight wrote: post #5

> Bigger the font, the closer your guess is as per my humble semantic AI. The font size appears to be uniform?

Checking page source, font size seems to imperceptibly vary (20.48px to 21.33px for me, after my guesses). More useful is that the list appears to be sorted so that closer guesses are at the bottom of the list.

Re: A word game I built to understand semantic distance

#14

Post by lucb1e »

jprete wrote: post #7
mromanuk wrote: post #3

It’s not working on iPhone

Nor on current Android Chrome.

On Firefox@Linux, the font was always the same size in the first game, but in the second game it wasn't. Not sure what bug you're seeing but I thought it was broken at first as well, now I think the distance algorithm is just broken for some words

Re: A word game I built to understand semantic distance

#15

Post by mmastrac »

alacritas0 wrote: post #11
mmastrac wrote: post #8

I really want to like games like this, but it's not really clear from the UI what direction you should be going. There's a list of suggestions, but I guess that's just a starting point? And a few words in it just ended the game. The previous versions of this game were _okay_, but semantic similarity is so fuzzy and the UIs just don't work for this yet. The intro is super cool tho, kudos for that.

I don't know if you have already played it, but https://contexto.me/ is probably the best UI I've seen for semantic word guessing games. It is simple enough that it can fit on a phone screen and only displays the rank of previous guesses in a bar that fills up more on guesses that are closer

That's probably the first one that's actually been kind of fun. I still don't understand the relationships between the words but it did very well.

Re: A word game I built to understand semantic distance

#18

Post by card_zero »

On mobile, the text I type is black on a black background.

On desktop, the intro movie stalls, and I have to do right-click -> show controls -> play, to get the game to start.

I just ran out of guesses (how many do you have?) and was told the secret word was yarn. About in the middle of my guesses was "string", apparently not very semantically related to yarn? I am not going to play this any more right now.

Post reply on HN