Reverse engineering Wordle • Hacker News Board

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#41

Post by giarc » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

dzdt wrote: post #9

I just hope the wordle developers manage to cash in on their going-viral jackpot without losing it to copycats or spoiling the experience for players.

I believe the developer was interviewed and said he/she has no plans to change the game to make money. If you go to just https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/ (maker of the game) you can see he made other games on Reddit (The Button and Place) and is listed as an artist, product manager, and engineer. I suspect the attention the game has received has resulted in many head hunters reaching out. Think of Wordle as a loss leader for his career.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#42

Post by bee_rider » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:39 PM UTC

bluesmoon wrote: post #32

Fun times. I remember back in the year 2000, during the dot com craze, there was a company in India that built a clone of "Who wants to be a millionaire". It was in beta and there was no real cash or prize involved. They had all the answers stored in the source code. I wrote up a quick perl script to play the game and unfortunately left it running overnight, and in the morning there were complaints from other players…

Did they give you a Most Valuable Tester award?

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#43

Post by rawling » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:41 PM UTC

sgmoore wrote: post #34

rawling wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 50%; the month is zero-indexed, but the day isn't.

So 19th of June 2021.

Yup, still annoying, just marginally less so!

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#44

Post by tyingq » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

deergomoo wrote: post #25

tyingq wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How common is it to have your minifier change symbol/variable names to short ones?

Pretty much all of them do it. You can’t minify keywords or literals, so that just leaves whitespace, which would be barely any minification at all.

Jsmin cited a typical 50% reduction without touching symbols, though perhaps that's an average that included removing comments.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#45

Post by thavalai » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

I liked this deconstruction of Wordle a lot: https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle...

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#46

Post by ipsin » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:48 PM UTC

magneticnorth wrote: post #38

qrohlf wrote: post #35

This is an unusual thing to find myself typing in a HN thread, but this could use a spoiler tag, as I did not expect to have tomorrow’s challenge ruined for me by a technical blog post.

I'm not easily finding the publication date, but for me the article says tomorrow's word is "query", which was actually the word a couple days ago. If that's what you see, too, then I think it's safe.

Thanks, I came here because I also thought Tomorrow Was Ruined.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#47

Post by primeradical » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

I rebuilt Wordle from scratch using the same word list. There are actually two word lists, one from which they select the answer, and another from which they validate real words. They are just arrays of strings hardcoded in the JS bundle.

When you submit a guess, it checks to see if your guess is in either array (or at least that's how I implemented it). And just does some relatively simple string comparison.

Your progress is just stored in local storage. You can blow your data away by deleting it via dev tools.

My version just lets you try again by refreshing, I'm not storing any data.

The viral factor of the original Wordle, IMO, is the share function and the little emoji grid it generates.

https://alexmj212.dev/word-guess/

Source: https://github.com/alexmj212/word-guess

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#48

Post by satsuma » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:51 PM UTC

rawling wrote: post #43

sgmoore wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 19th of June 2021.

Yup, still annoying, just marginally less so!

i'd argue the lack of consistency is more annoying, not less.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#49

Post by palijer » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:53 PM UTC

manceraio wrote: post #16

This website is crashing Chrome on my Xiaomi :/

Yeah! Came here to say the same thing, Chrome on a One Plus Six.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#50

Post by Reventlov » Wed, Jan 12, 2022, 4:55 PM UTC

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #10

nilsbunger wrote: post #3

I figured that was possible; from the UX it was pretty clear it’s all client side. What I would find cool is derivation of the best strategy at any time. Just like blackjack, there should be a “best” move at all times , and it would be cool to measure yourself against that

I think there’s been a few of those on hacker news. Let me dig one up

There is this one (from myself) : https://remy.grunblatt.org/static/wordle/wordle.svg (dynamic version: https://remy.grunblatt.org/static/wordle/).

It's not optimal at all, but works for every wordle word; it's built by finding the word (guess) that minimizes the maximum size of the possible words (to guess), a bit like Knuth Algorithm for Mastermind.

For an optimal strategy, a backtracking solution with pruning / maybe a branch and bound approach would work, but I didn't manage to implement a fast enough implementation for my small 8 threads CPU.