3 ms·

This program actually inadvertently created a quite philosophical discussion amongst my friends! Some of them contended that writing a program to solve wordle s

This program actually inadvertently created a quite philosophical discussion amongst my friends! Some of them contended that writing a program to solve wordle sucked the joy out of the process of solving it, even if I solved the puzzle myself, first.

ycombobreaker 5y ago
Yes it's interesting, precisely because it's intuitively "solvable" by machines. There's joy in solving by hand, and joy in creating a solver, but probably no joy in running your solver every day and sharing with your friends. Because every decision is some maximum-likelihood estimate, there's no tension or drama in the sequence of guesses. In fact, simply the act of creating an infallible solver (100% likelihood of 6 guesses or less) demonstrates the futility of competing with their soft, fleshy skills. I do think any solver that uses the solution-set is "cheating", but I suspect it makes little difference in the total solution (like... 2-3 bits of additional information needed, just a fraction of a round).
- eru 5y ago
  You might find some enjoyment in writing solvers that compete with your friends' solvers? You could either compete on number of guesses. Or you could fix the hardware (eg a Famicom), and compete on runtime?
moritonal 5y ago
I once caused a vague division in my secondary school by writing a (looking back now) horrendously hacky OCR solver for our "world maths day" challenge. Literally half the teachers thought it was cheating and I should be punished, whilst the other half thought (because I hadn't abused it to win prizes) that it showed a creative use of more modern skills to make up for my renowned weak mental-math. I saw the joy in writing the solver as much more interesting than the math. Same way I can't focus on sudoku given I always try to "solve" solving it.

3 ms·

This program actually inadvertently created a quite philosophical discussion amongst my friends! Some of them contended that writing a program to solve wordle s

by tomlockwood 5y ago

ycombobreaker 5y ago
Yes it's interesting, precisely because it's intuitively "solvable" by machines. There's joy in solving by hand, and joy in creating a solver, but probably no joy in running your solver every day and sharing with your friends. Because every decision is some maximum-likelihood estimate, there's no tension or drama in the sequence of guesses. In fact, simply the act of creating an infallible solver (100% likelihood of 6 guesses or less) demonstrates the futility of competing with their soft, fleshy skills. I do think any solver that uses the solution-set is "cheating", but I suspect it makes little difference in the total solution (like... 2-3 bits of additional information needed, just a fraction of a round).
- eru 5y ago
  You might find some enjoyment in writing solvers that compete with your friends' solvers? You could either compete on number of guesses. Or you could fix the hardware (eg a Famicom), and compete on runtime?
moritonal 5y ago
I once caused a vague division in my secondary school by writing a (looking back now) horrendously hacky OCR solver for our "world maths day" challenge. Literally half the teachers thought it was cheating and I should be punished, whilst the other half thought (because I hadn't abused it to win prizes) that it showed a creative use of more modern skills to make up for my renowned weak mental-math. I saw the joy in writing the solver as much more interesting than the math. Same way I can't focus on sudoku given I always try to "solve" solving it.