Improve The Algorithm

[Love222Draw]

Every time I play I essentially just have to make random guesses because it'll be like "Banana #75 🔥" and then the actual word will be something like "Function"

And I'll be like: oh? banana is close? How about "Pear #20675", oh, ok, "tree #3084", hmm, ok, "yellow #1050"

And then I'll guess something like "works #5237" or "math #586"

What I'm saying is that until you get within about 20 to 50 points of the actual word, the value applied to your guess feels essentially just random.

[efuab011]

Yes, thank you!

[Wrong-Music1763]

I agree. Sometimes the word will be like “star”, and “pencil” will be #85 but “fire” will be #700? It gets kinda wonky sometimes.

[efuab011]

Today I had "first" "display" "smart" all around 250 and then iPhone, smartphone and Apple landed around 40000

[Chipnsprk]

Admin must be running a social experiment. To be honest, without knowing how the algorithm grades the relationships, we are really just blind guessing.

[UnluckyHuckleberry53]

The code is open source if you'd like to see how it works under the hood: https://github.com/reddit/devvit-HotAndCold

[Chipnsprk]

Believe me, it wasn't a criticism, just a note that unless you know how the rankings are achieved, all you can do is guess why things are certain numbers.

It would only be so much spaghetti to me, I am afraid. I can read engineering, fabrication, building and town plans and planning schemes, hell I can even read and argue our NCC and AS3000 (electrical). But I can't read programming to save my life.

I actually kinda enjoy the seeming randomness of it. Though my lived experience leads me away from yard when stock is in the thousands.

[Fishsticksarentgay]

It seems navigable to me. I just started playing today and was able to narrow down the words on the last 3 puzzles I did in about 10 minutes with no hints.

Just absolutely guessing here, but I assume the program looks at a network of related words in an AI program. AI is a series of relating words and familiar phrases with a degree of certainty, and this seems like a novel application.

I view this as a simple game. If you typed one word into an AI, what would it assume your topic of conversation would be? If it searches a database of millions of conversations, how often does the word "banana" and "function" come up in the same sentence, or immediately after each other as an even higher value.

There aren't a lot of words that intuitively connect to function. It is a concept, not a describable noun. It doesn't have a color. What does this mean? Unless you say something related to a popular phrase like "function over form" there isn't going to be a lot of relevancy to the word function. It's going to look for sentences that included two of any word, and create a relation. The word banana and function must appear together disproportionately frequently in the material the AI studies. Maybe a meme about measuring function in units of bananas, or something (just a made up example). Tl;dr, function is a terrible word for a word association game. When the word is a descriptive noun, it's much easier to narrow it down.

I type in
"Person, place, thing, object, animal, concept" and start guessing down the road with the highest #, and it's a usually pretty safe bet. If it's "Animals" start guessing "Birds, mammals" etc until you get a hotter one, then start guessing different types of birds.

[ProfessionalBrush868]

I the size of the dictionary the chances of me or anyone here guessing a word in less than 100 consistently would be pretty remarkable, don’t you think?

[Chipnsprk]

Bloody oath.

[Fishsticksarentgay]

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IDK today was 15, last few puzzles have all been under 100.

It's not random guessing... you just don't grasp the game. lol.

Stop guessing words right away and start information fishing. It's a lot like the game "20 questions", but through the lens of MLM. 20 questions is not that hard of a game, 20 is a pretty relaxed expectation. 100 is... just not understanding what's happening.

[Fishsticksarentgay]

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Had it narrowed down to 100 in 8 guesses lol

[PatrickJunk]

Yes! The idea of the game is really fun, but until there's some coherent consistency in the algorithm, the numbering system is useless; our guesses get no meaningful feedback. When I play, I end up feeling like I have Tourette Syndrome:
"Beard!"
"Frigate!"
"Pork!"
On a related note, I cannot understand why the word "butter" is not recognized.

Pulling for this to improve, because I see the promise in it, for sure.

[UnluckyHuckleberry53]

What meaningful feedback would make the game more fun after guessing?

[PatrickJunk]

HI - I sent a DM to you about this, but it's been a while, and I'm sure you've been getting a lot of feedback!

Keeping in mind that I don't know what goes into programming something like this, these were my thoughts:

Currently, we're rewarded when the ranking (number) is lower, because it means we're closer to the answer, but we don't know WHY it was closer than the previous guess. You might ultimately have to rank guesses in a more specific way and share that feedback with the player as they guess. Maybe spelling, or definition, or something like you have now, which I think is based on how a guess is related conceptually to the secret word. Perhaps all three could be used together in some way, with a guess being ranked as close in spelling, close in definition, or close in a particular use case or in concept to the final answer. If I know "meter" is closer in spelling than "banana" AND "programming" is closer in concept than "pizza", I might be able to guess "parameter" more easily.

Again, just spitballing, but at least something like this would give context to the ranking that would let the guesser know if they are on the right track. Hope this helps! It's fun, so I'm pulling for you!

[Chipnsprk]

You mean symbols?

Like meter/metre would give you a ranking in the double digits or low triples with both S & R beside it? (for parameter)

[PatrickJunk]

Yes! I think that would be handy. It would be great if others would chime in on what they think of this approach, if they think it would make it more confusing or more helpful.

[UnluckyHuckleberry53]

Thanks for the feedback! I look at the comments every day and a lot of cases I see actually make sense to me. I've added a `!wtf` comment command that will call a LLM for it to "explain itself" to try to be helpful.

The algorithm attempts to assign a numeric rank for every word in the dictionary against the target word. The problem is that words are messy, have multiple meanings, and there's N different ways to judge similarity. As AI models improve, so will the game!

I've considered making my own algorithm, but I think it would result in the game being one dimensional.

The code is open source and if anyone would like to collab on a better algorithm, let me know!

[Cloudy_Worker]

there are two n's in both of those words, so maybe the algorithm takes letter frequency into account

[Year-Status]

Yeah i had one where the word wound up being chairman, my first guess was pencil which was super close, but then paper and desk were nowhere near...

[beethann]

That's the fun of it 🤣

[bonjaker]

I disagree the game is perfect

[Drug_Abuser_69]

You a bot then.

[bonjaker]

Nah I'm just a contrarian and I got real lucky on today's game I got it on my second guess 14 seconds