15 ms·
Show HN: Evil Wordle
- ColinWright 5y agoSee also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862597 Same idea, different implementation.
- raviparikh 5y agoAh yeah a friend sent that to me right after I created my version! I remembered making an “evil hangman” in class many years ago so probably a lot of folks will have the same idea.
- siftrics 5y ago.
- user_7832 5y agoI'm not sure if assuming malice makes sense. If the OP of this post was busy coding they'd likely have missed the earlier post. In fact I'd guess that except for some people most don't follow HN that religiously. Side note, why might someone want to earn karma on HN? I know people on reddit sometimes do it to sell their accounts but I'd imagine it to be much more pointless here.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cableshaft 5y agoI managed to get it in 6: STRAP - ______ BIOME - __Y_Y HOVEL - _G_G_ CONED - GG_GY CODEX - GGGG_ CODEC - GGGGG Cool idea, btw.
- raviparikh 5y agoNice! That’s the best I’ve managed as well.
- turbonaut 5y agoA (self-made) tool-assisted 5… 1. LARES - xxxxx 2. BIONT - xxYxx 3. PUDGY - xxxxG 4. COMFY - GGxxG 5. COCKY - GGGGG I agree - great idea. It only took 22 hours’ CPU time, a custom string encoding and several trillion operations to work out LARES was a decent first go.
- scatters 5y agoAnother 5 run (non tool-assisted, I guess I just got lucky): STRAY - xxxxx BOWEL - xxxYx MEDIC - xYxYY CHUNK - GGxGx CHINE - GGGGG I guess that means that 4 isn't possible? Is there a better strategy for the opponent that would make even 5 impossible?
- cohomologo 5y agoI got lucky with 5 as well: ADIEU BLAST MANOR FANNY CANNA ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜
- SamBam 5y agoSomeone else posted: AIRED, BOOTS, PLUNK, CHUCK and that works in 4. The best I had gotten myself was five.
- cdubzzz 5y agoThis is fun! Though when I dove right in I mistakenly thought that the indicator for the correct letter was also indicating the correct position for that letter. But that was not the case. I had a weird combo and had to give up before I understood that.
- ianbicking 5y agoMy kid is now trying to solve it, keeping careful notes of letters. I explained what (I'm guessing) makes it evil, but she's undeterred. (Solved in 15)
- Kuinox 5y agoDoesn't know the word "femto": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femto- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femto-
- chrisshroba 5y agoPrefixes are not themselves words.
- 13of40 5y agoI think there's also the question of whether a word adopted from Danish by an international standards body in the 20th century automatically counts as English.
- krallja 5y agoUse “femto-“ in a sentence.
- roberto 5y ago"Femto (symbol f) is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10−15"
- Beldin 5y ago> Use “femto-“ in a sentence. There you go.
- amptorn 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...
- rkr1410 5y agoEven if we discard obligatory quotes, there's still the hyphen as a part of stand-alone version of this "word". So when I use "femto-" by itself in a sentence, it's at best 6 characters long.
- bspammer 5y agoIt's a cool idea, but it'd be nice to show which letters have been eliminated like "real" Wordle. I don't think not having them makes the game harder, just more tedious.
- jtbayly 5y agoMaybe more evil. Lol.
- raviparikh 5y agoGood suggestion–I just added this!
- bspammer 5y agoAwesome, thanks :D
- neogodless 5y agoOn my first try toast cluEd whEre BEGIN BEING Correct!
- zdwolfe 5y agoThanks, I hate it. [Cool game!]
- zwegner 5y agoThis uses different word lists than Wordle/Adversarial Wordle, but still has a 4-guess optimum, no 3-guess is possible. My solver's found about a thousand so far, here's a good one: "abyes choup donut dingo" (note that there are a number of 'fake' words allowed for guesses).
- pxx 5y agoThis might be a solution for the suboptimal adversary used here but it's not a solution in general. abyes GXXXX choup XXXXX donut XXYXX dingo XYYYX matches both aging, again so this solution doesn't actually partition the solution space the way you want it to.
- zwegner 5y agoThe solution partitions the solution space exactly the way I want it to: it was designed for the site this thread is about. Obviously it doesn't work against an arbitrary adversary. My solution is static and doesn't take any clues into account, so what you're saying just doesn't feel very relevant. The only "solution in general" to an arbitrary adversary, if you're not allowed to look at the clues it gives, is just to guess every single target word, which isn't very interesting. Now, you could easily argue that the greedy strategy used by the site is suboptimal, and I'd agree, but AFAIK nobody's put up a site with a better one yet.
- beatthatflight 5y agoabyes xxxxx choup xxyxx donut gygxx dingo ggggg :D
- raviparikh 5y ago> note that there are a number of 'fake' words allowed for guesses I used a much larger dictionary for allowed guesses than for the actual words that get chosen.
- pxx 5y ago> The goal is to maximize the amount of guesses it takes to find the word The heuristic used is not optimal for this. You want to choose the set that takes the most number of guesses to split, which is not necessarily the set with the largest number of elements.
- sdwr 5y agoHad this bouncing around my subconscious, thanks for crystallizing it.
- lupire 5y agoAUXIN Not really fun when the dictionary uses extremely obscure words.
- thaurelia 5y agoI wonder what is the best strategy over a long distance? “ALONE” and “SHIRT” cover 1st to 9th and 11th most common letters in English dictionary but then, you'll be getting more yellow letters in first two words which might not be the best approach (compared to completely eliminating 10 letters altogether). Then, for words like “_OUCH”, it might be optimal to come up with a word containing as many potential first letters as possible (while omitting letters already in use, “ouch” in this case).
- salomon812 5y agoSo, there's another evil Wordle thread on Hacker News today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862597) and over there, I've been refining my algorith for optimal play. Here's the current approach: R A I S E (0 green, 0 yellow, 168 words remain) B L U D Y (1 green, 0 yellow, 13 words remain) C O U N T (2 green, 1 yellow, 2 words remain) V O U C H (4 green, 0 yellow, 1 word remains) P O U C H (5 green, 0 yellow, 0 words remain) But what was interesting was at one point of development, it did this: L A R E S (0 green, 0 yellow, 576 words remain) T O N I C (1 green, 0 yellow, 50 words remain) B O O D Y (4 green, 0 yellow, 5 words remain) D E G U M (0 green, 2 yellow, 1 word remains) G O O D Y (5 green, 0 yellow, 0 words remain) See, the "BOODY" has 4 greens, but then it went and guess "DEGUM" to eliminate a lot of possibilities!
- kregasaurusrex 5y agoOne additional feature I was looking at for a personal implementation was picking the target word- how is it being chosen from the remaining letters after the player's first guess? Are you using a word that purposely uses fewer common letters from the set of remaining words?
- salomon812 5y agoNo, I'm looping through all possible guess and targets and grouping possible targets by matching scoring. Then I select a guess on which one has the smallest set of possible words afterwards. For example, "SERAI" seems to be a good first word. The reason why is that even if the adversary selects the worst-case scoring of (in this case, it would be no green, no yellow), there's only 168 remaining words it could be.
- giarc 5y agoSeems like this will be the same as the 2046 craze. Game becomes popular then a million copy-cats and off shoots get created.
- krallja 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threes
- giarc 5y agoLooks like I fell victim and referenced the wrong game. Seems like 2048 (correction to my 2046 comment) was a knock off in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threes#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threes#Legacy
- krallja 5y agoIt always makes me sad that 2048 is the more famous game. Threes is so full of charm and joy. 2048 is sterile, mathematical and precise.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rkagerer 5y agoWordle itself stems from a really great two-player pen and paper game called Bulls and Cows that I used to play decades ago. Google it for the rules.
- gowld 5y agoThis engine is deterministic. No computer assistance, no obscure words, hard mode: AIRED ----- BOOTS ----- PLUNK --U-K CHUCK CHUCK
- makach 5y agoEvil Wordle: "bobby". I won after 12 guesses Ha! fun game. The fun was writing a program to narrow down the alternative words, now I lost interest in the game.
- not2b 5y agoI got 'bobby' in 7, a bit of luck perhaps.
- assbuttbuttass 5y agoFun but wtf is "direr"
- LegitShady 5y agoEvil Wordle: "coves". I won after 14 guesses Turns out _o_es has a few options to guess...
- darepublic 5y agoGot it in 6 guesses, then 7
- Physkal 5y agoI keep pull down refreshing the page and can't go back to what the word was. Also cataegories would be nice. Also a list of the alphabet at the bottom would cross out wrong guesses would be nice.
- allannienhuis 5y agothe word is not pre-determined. it changes based on what you are guessing, to make it harder to guess a matching word.
- Physkal 5y agoAlso definitions would be nice
- jimbob45 5y ago22 guesses. Seems like the trick is to select letters in their worst positions first so that it later puts them in more favorable positions (e.g. don’t guess Q in the first spot if you can put it anywhere else first.
- dvh 5y agowas thinking of "boyos". You lose!
- bmmayer1 5y agoEvil Wordle: "fixes". I won after 8 guesses ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜ ⬜ https://swag.github.io/evil-wordle/ https://swag.github.io/evil-wordle/
- dmarlow 5y agoALKYL -- took me 14 guesses. You're a monster.
- pjsg 5y agoEvil Wordle: "beefs". I won after 6 guesses arose until weeds peeks seems beefs
- coverband 5y agoCool idea… I made it from MAIZE to BODED in 8 attempts.
- bejelentkezni 5y agoPaste to debug in 12 guesses. Had never heard of the original wordle before, cool game. wwwwY Paste wwwww Color wwwww Print wwwww Loops Ywwww Bombs RRwww Death RRRww Debts RRRww Debby (It should be obvious here that I didn't know how the game worked) RRRww Debit wYwww Junks (Questionable that this is counted as a real word imo) YwwwY Gorge RRRRR Debug
- claviska 5y agoProud to share that I got the word “balls” in 15 guesses.
- moyix 5y agoSee also qntm's Absurdle, which similarly tries to be a maximally difficult by taking your guess at each stage and using it to prune the list of possible answers, picking the largest set consistent with your guesses so far each time. Play: https://qntm.org/files/wordle/index.html https://qntm.org/files/wordle/index.html The author also wrote up this nice article describing in detail how the algorithm works: https://qntm.org/wordle https://qntm.org/wordle Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29862597
- Ninjinka 5y agoWow that's annoying. Evil Wordle: "booed". I won after 9 guesses ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜⬜ ⬜ ⬜ ⬜
- ad404b8a372f2b9 5y agoIt likes the "boo"s it seems. Booed, books, booms, boons, boobs.
- zjs 5y agoEvil Wordle: "caver". I won after 6 guesses Y____ YY___ _____ _G_GG GG_GG GGGGG
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