6 ms·

A word game I built to understand semantic distance

celestiallylvd1 2y ago
Cosine distance on GloVe-50 trained on Wikipedia. *GloVe is an unsupervised learning algorithm for obtaining vector representations for words. Training is performed on aggregated global word-word co-occurrence statistics from a corpus, and the resulting representations showcase interesting linear substructures of the word vector space.
mromanuk 2y ago
It’s not working on iPhone
- jprete 2y ago
  Nor on current Android Chrome.
  - lucb1e 2y ago
    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
empath-nirvana 2y ago
I don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing here.
- ebri 2y ago
  Me neither.
FireInsight 2y ago
> Bigger the font, the closer your guess is as per my humble semantic AI. The font size appears to be uniform?
- Ukv 2y ago
  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.
  - celestiallylvd1 2y ago
    Yes, you guessed it right! I am curious what the strike rate of an expert player could be, how it might compare with GPT-4, and if humans can outperform by discovering a strategy.
fifilura 2y ago
The intro is really cool! I have a feeling that the game idea is really cool. But as other mentioned, I don't seem to understand what I should be doing. And there is only one font size (Firefox/Linux). The instructions hint otherwise. I also get the same list of suggestions every time.
mmastrac 2y ago
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.
- alacritas0 2y ago
  I don't know if you have already played it, but https://contexto.me/ 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
  - mmastrac 2y ago
    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.
sebsebmc 2y ago
Another semantic distance guessing game is https://semantle.com/ https://semantle.com/
hot_cereal 2y ago
It's fun, reminds me of an early version of Semantle. Font size as a proximity indicator is a neat idea but also kind of annoying in practice, because it's hard to have an intuitive understanding of how close or far you are. Would suggest a numeric scale. But that's a very minor nitpick, cool concept!
pfdietz 2y ago
Some instructions would have made this interesting.
ttpphd 2y ago
Cool! It's a fun challenge to come up with a meaningful hint system. Here's mine from 2022: https://greatfilter.itch.io/lexicode https://greatfilter.itch.io/lexicode
gwern 2y ago
Word Golf: https://www.word.golf/ https://www.word.golf/
card_zero 2y ago
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.
Falimonda 2y ago
How is this on the front page? On initial load, I was met with a completley black screen after the animation. On second load, there's a form field with no context as to what to enter. After submission, I'm still completely lost.
jensenbox 2y ago
The coolest part about this is that I was unaware that you could force full screen and lock the orientation from a web page. TIL
ajay-d 2y ago
I made something similar; reverse dictionary to play with embeddings https://deonarine.com/posts/reverse-dictionary/ https://deonarine.com/posts/reverse-dictionary/
dcsan 2y ago
from what i see you have to guess a word from the list given yellow squares are how many tries you have as you put a word in, it will get added to the list of guesses the closer words are at the bottom (thanks @ukv) so the goal is to extrapolate, eg is it an animal name, or an object? based on the order of your previous tries. the font-size thing is a complete misnomer as its not really perceptible. but the insert location for guesses is more useful (but not documented) there may be sort algorithm strategies for playing this, eg try two most distant words first... but the nature of the multi-dimensional word-distance being flattened to a single dimension makes it really hard to guess, imho. when you get it right it deletes all word context and history. interesting idea but a front-end dev could help make it playable! https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=p6QKLIMAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=p6QKLIMAAAAJ&hl=...

Cosine distance on GloVe-50 trained on Wikipedia. *GloVe is an unsupervised learning algorithm for obtaining vector representations for words. Training is performed on aggregated global word-word co-occurrence statistics from a corpus, and the resulting representations showcase interesting linear substructures of the word vector space.

mromanuk 2y ago

It’s not working on iPhone

jprete 2y ago
Nor on current Android Chrome.
- lucb1e 2y ago
  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

empath-nirvana 2y ago

I don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing here.

ebri 2y ago
Me neither.

FireInsight 2y ago

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

Ukv 2y ago
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.
- celestiallylvd1 2y ago
  Yes, you guessed it right! I am curious what the strike rate of an expert player could be, how it might compare with GPT-4, and if humans can outperform by discovering a strategy.

fifilura 2y ago

The intro is really cool! I have a feeling that the game idea is really cool. But as other mentioned, I don't seem to understand what I should be doing. And there is only one font size (Firefox/Linux). The instructions hint otherwise. I also get the same list of suggestions every time.

mmastrac 2y ago

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.

alacritas0 2y ago
I don't know if you have already played it, but https://contexto.me/ 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
- mmastrac 2y ago
  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.

sebsebmc 2y ago

Another semantic distance guessing game is https://semantle.com/ https://semantle.com/

hot_cereal 2y ago

It's fun, reminds me of an early version of Semantle. Font size as a proximity indicator is a neat idea but also kind of annoying in practice, because it's hard to have an intuitive understanding of how close or far you are. Would suggest a numeric scale. But that's a very minor nitpick, cool concept!

pfdietz 2y ago

Some instructions would have made this interesting.

ttpphd 2y ago

Cool! It's a fun challenge to come up with a meaningful hint system. Here's mine from 2022: https://greatfilter.itch.io/lexicode https://greatfilter.itch.io/lexicode

gwern 2y ago

Word Golf: https://www.word.golf/ https://www.word.golf/

card_zero 2y ago

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.

Falimonda 2y ago

How is this on the front page? On initial load, I was met with a completley black screen after the animation. On second load, there's a form field with no context as to what to enter. After submission, I'm still completely lost.

jensenbox 2y ago

The coolest part about this is that I was unaware that you could force full screen and lock the orientation from a web page. TIL

ajay-d 2y ago

I made something similar; reverse dictionary to play with embeddings https://deonarine.com/posts/reverse-dictionary/ https://deonarine.com/posts/reverse-dictionary/

dcsan 2y ago

from what i see you have to guess a word from the list given yellow squares are how many tries you have as you put a word in, it will get added to the list of guesses the closer words are at the bottom (thanks @ukv) so the goal is to extrapolate, eg is it an animal name, or an object? based on the order of your previous tries. the font-size thing is a complete misnomer as its not really perceptible. but the insert location for guesses is more useful (but not documented) there may be sort algorithm strategies for playing this, eg try two most distant words first... but the nature of the multi-dimensional word-distance being flattened to a single dimension makes it really hard to guess, imho. when you get it right it deletes all word context and history. interesting idea but a front-end dev could help make it playable! https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=p6QKLIMAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=p6QKLIMAAAAJ&hl=...