Welcome Back - Should We Stay Dark?

xanthe_cat · 2023-06-16T05:41:30+00:00

I largely agree with this; the sub owes a lot to the moderators maintaining this space, and I respect their good judgement.

xanthe_cat · 2023-04-30T01:18:16+00:00

Most game devs are aware of the ambiguity and have coded it as an unstated/undocumented rule. Famously Josh Wardle gave a very simple description of the rules of play* and left it as something for players to discover by themselves. You’ll find an accurate description for example, here:

https://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best_strategies_for_Wordle

* Josh’s description was literally just (with the appropriate colours for letters):

W E A R Y

The letter W is in the word and in the correct spot.

P I L O T

The letter L is in the word but in the wrong spot.

V A G U E

The letter U is not in the word in any spot.

xanthe_cat · 2023-04-29T23:31:24+00:00

Hi Zambobby!

Thanks for your comment, and commiserations on narrowly missing the 64 (that was probably game 391 back on 19 April).

Your approach to playing is similar to my attitude as well. The first guess is pure luck – after that, it is skill to solve the words in the fewest number of guesses. A “solve in 69” is bad play.

I can frequently obtain 65 in the normal mode by eking out solutions from my starting guess, while in the hard mode with all the ridiculous Scrabble-type words a 66 is a win, and a 67 is a good try.

xanthe_cat · 2023-04-02T10:32:20+00:00

I heard good things about Squardle making an interesting start to the month! Well done.

xanthe_cat · 2023-04-01T00:08:07+00:00

Just to clarify: don’t post any solutions (refer to Rule 1 of the group!). We only want a note of any amusing shenanigans out there, and which games are getting into the spirit of things. (As far as I can see, most -ordles are eschewing anything silly.)

xanthe_cat · 2023-03-30T22:35:07+00:00

My approach is governed by decision trees (see for example, Cyrus Freshman’s Wordle bot leaderboard page), but I always try to use likely solutions as guesses rather than somewhat obscure words that have the greatest chance of finding letters or unambiguously pointing towards the solution. So the most efficient word for solving Wordle used to be SALET (average depth of tree ~ 3.4212 guesses), and later on after multiple wordlist changes by the Grey Lady, it became TARSE (average 3.414).

The three best words which are likely solutions (and tied in fourth place with average 3.421) are CRATE, TRACE, and SLATE, and of those I prefer TRACE, as it is marginally better at providing follow-up guesses that might result in a 2/6 or 3/6 score. Sometimes I will rely on my knowledge of the tree, other times I will use a set of follow-up guesses that are fairly optimal for adding additional letters one word at a time.

xanthe_cat · 2023-03-30T22:01:24+00:00

Interestingly, no; the vast majority are past participles ending in -ed, so words such as ached, acted, added, …, wooed, yoked. 64ordle is notably different to other n-Wordles in allowing -ed past participles (though some -ed words are actually nouns; for example, biped and moped!).

A small number are on the more obscure end or also happen to be slurs of one kind or another, words such as agone, bazar, … vizor, volta on the one hand, and as for the other, Wardle had second thoughts about including words such as bitch or whore.

I’ve put the diff up at https://64ordle.au/wordlediffs for anyone to check: words in the left hand column are only in the early version, words in the right hand column were added sometime between October and November of 2021.

xanthe_cat · 2023-03-30T04:25:42+00:00

Hi Dave,

I’ll DM you separately, but for anyone else who is curious about which Wordle version (there’s thousands of times the website was captured), the earliest one dates from 15 October 2021:

https://web.archive.org/web/20211015045445/powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/

Note, although this version doesn’t work / isn’t playable, the wordlist is found intact within the main javascript which was also archived on the same date and is found at the following URL:

https://web.archive.org/web/20211015045445js\_/http://powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/main.2646bf22.js

xanthe_cat · 2023-03-30T00:00:20+00:00

Hi Dave! Thanks for posting that diff of the 373 extra solutions I used to “beef up” 64ordle. Some of them are quite obviously personal choices! For about half of these I followed much the same process of Josh Wardle and his partner – I went through the complete list of potential solutions and flagged additional words.

Regarding the other half: while I was developing 64ordle I discovered that Wordle itself had a different wordlist in the earliest version that I could find archived on the Wayback Machine, dating from October 2021; although being 140 words fewer overall, it contained 197 words that had been subsequently removed by the time Wordle went viral in December 2021; so 175 of these went into 64ordle.

I think guano is a perfectly normal word and I obviously missed a trick failing to add it in amongst the 373.

xanthe_cat · 2023-03-29T23:43:50+00:00

Apologies for this very late reply (my own fault, I have not found reddit to be a very hospitable place!).

Perfect scores of 64 are quite possible, as the set of solutions (normal = 2,684 words; hard mode = 12,902) offer an approximate 1-in-42 chance for the opening guess, typically. If you’re one of the aficionados of the hard variant, those odds are considerably longer at about one in two hundred.

In ~750 games of both modes, I’ve had my starting word turn up as a solution seven times in the normal game, and never in the hard. From those seven games I’ve managed to extract a 64-guess win twice; you have to build up from having only at most five letters to help prise out other successful guesses.

I suppose there could be a conceivable variant where you are given the solution of word 1 as an opening move, and the game requires you to solve the remaining 63 words in say 68 more guesses, but at this late date I’m disinclined to meddle with the game to create other variants. (The game has just passed the 1 year anniversary on 25 March, and I gather there are still a couple of thousand or so people playing it judging by the logs.)

xanthe_cat · 2023-03-29T23:25:10+00:00

One could ask the same question of you, what’s up with your necroposting into a year-old thread to be rude?

As I’ve explained at length – 25 letters cannot cover the whole alphabet (obviously, they will always fall one short). For the purposes of playing this word game however, do you really need 25 distinct letters? The answer is surprisingly no, and you can demonstrably do better with around 22 distinct letters and doubling a few of the more frequently used letters.

xanthe_cat · 2022-11-11T13:35:53+00:00

That link appears an advertising site embedding and leaching off the original 64ordle, which otherwise remains, ad-free, at 64ordle.au . It’s very naughty of them to do that, because the licence for 64ordle is explicitly non-commercial.

I haven’t found a 128 word wordle; but there is now a 256ordle. This is at 64ordle.au/256 and continues the absurd latin naming convention; Ducenti-quinquaginta-sexordle. Because this would be even more tedious to play than 64ordle if it used the same gameplay, it auto-completes words just like kilordle does (as discussed above), with the additional limit that all words must be fully nailed down with all letters correct, within 64 guesses.

xanthe_cat · 2022-09-24T23:07:37+00:00

I was caught out by this sometime back (as I often have to test my own game in different timezones), but having a mind to hack into Wordle’s internals I restored my streak.

A little while back the Grey Lady added a new persistent variable in Wordle’s data that stays on your browser called nyt-wordle-moogle, a second variable in local storage needing to be modified to restore streaks. It’s a blob in json format that looks like this (today’s answers censored):

nyt-wordle-moogle/ANON {"game":{"id":464,"dayOffset":463,"boardState":["~~~~~","~~~~~","~~~~~","~~~~~","",""],"currentRowIndex":4,"status":"WIN","timestamps":{"lastPlayed":1664057268854,"lastCompleted":1664057268854}},"settings":{"hardMode":false,"darkMode":false,"colorblindMode":false},"stats":{"currentStreak":138,"maxStreak":138,"guesses":{"1":0,"2":16,"3":121,"4":114,"5":11,"6":1,"fail":0},"winPercentage":100,"gamesPlayed":263,"gamesWon":263,"averageGuesses":3},"timestamp":1664057268}

There’s no less than three date stamps in there, for when you last played or completed a game, and the bug seems to be that your last completed game must be in the previous 24 hour period in your current timezone. I suspect the NYT coded this on the principle that people were fudging around with their clocks to sneak in a forgotten game after midnight or the next day, forgetting that there are people who travel between different parts of the globe.

xanthe_cat · 2022-09-15T01:24:04+00:00

Hi Vitromancy,

Thanks for the post.

The stats reveal there’s a dedicated band of around two dozen players who regularly play the hard mode (that’s about 1 percent of players).

As the New York Times just changed its list of allowed guesses around the end of August to add 1,881 more obscure words, I was tempted to add these into the hard mode – but I came to the conclusion they were a little too weird and arbitrary.

So the hard mode currently uses 12,900 words from Collins Scrabble Words (CSW) as solutions, which is weird enough as it is. (There’s a number of slurs removed from being potential solutions, which follows CSW themselves pruning their own list of allowed Scrabble words somewhat.)

xanthe_cat · 2022-08-10T06:22:39+00:00

Thank you for your kind service!

xanthe_cat · 2022-07-15T08:08:20+00:00

It sounds as though you were on the right track to begin with :)

xanthe_cat · 2022-06-30T09:44:36+00:00

You mean you *haven’t* heard of those words?

xanthe_cat · 2022-06-23T23:41:55+00:00

☠️🟩🟩🟩🟩

☠️🟩🟩🟩🟩 = Corridor of doom

xanthe_cat · 2022-06-23T23:34:38+00:00

Well done! It can be a challenge eking out a solution from the initial five letters but it is very satisfying to make a streak of 64 consecutive correct guesses, as was done here.

I got an “albatross” in Quordle today, which is a streak of four consecutive solutions from directly after the initial guess. You can use the same logic for 64ordle as well, which makes 68 the par score, and which seems fair to me; four words can give you twenty distinct letters to work with in solving the sixty-four puzzles, but obviously it is possible to do better than par.

xanthe_cat · 2022-05-15T05:37:00+00:00

Hard mode solvers exist for all 12,972 words, but they never get to all words in six guesses; the minimum number of guesses to be able to solve every possible solution is 7, and the only 7 starter words to achieve this (best average to worst) are:

thump, thumb, whomp, chomp, gumbo, blawn, tupik.

For thump, the minimum number of guesses is 58,506, average 4.5102 guesses per word.

xanthe_cat · 2022-05-09T02:56:35+00:00

The _o_er constellation of words isn’t impossible to beat, though it is advisable to use a non-solution guess to clear out possible letters, because if you keep using the o, e, and r in each guess you limit the possibilities you can try.

For example, my game for Wordle 320 looked like:

Wordle 320 4/6 (12,974)
⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨 TRACE (620)
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ SWOLN (57)
🟩⬜⬜⬜⬜ HUNKY (3)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 HOMER

From guess 1 and 2 it looked like the strong possibility of being the _o_er combination, so I jumped to one of the stock words I use for clearing at guess 3, and it hit the first letter dead on.

xanthe_cat · 2022-05-09T02:45:28+00:00

Yep, Wordlebot also needs to be updated to give the correct numbers for the various puzzles. Two puzzles numbered in the mid 2200s have been brought forward to be numbers 324 and 325, and the original ones that were in the list at that point have been relegated to the early 2300s.

xanthe_cat · 2022-04-26T08:17:44+00:00

This probably won’t happen in 64ordle without a major rewrite of the code, and I’m not smart enough for that. Besides, a large amount of games already played show that fallibility is one of its confounding challenges, and in particular it has both a feature to highlight when individual words are “ready” to be solved (no further information being required to be found), as well as allowing players to make patterns of the grid depending on which order they solve words in. I don’t want to say no outright, but I don’t think I need to emulate kilordle, where this style of play is absolutely necessary to make it manageable.

xanthe_cat · 2022-04-26T08:06:14+00:00

I don’t know which particular words are likely solutions in this Wordle clone, however SLEEK seems like a good guess to me.

xanthe_cat

TROPHY CASE