Tomtit in the tilth -- the NY TIMES SPELLING BEE thread

I think we all await Trayce's opinion of today's PG.

Haw haw :)

I'm finding today hard tbh. It might be the savage hangover.

QB'ed it but had to rely on the NYT clue crew for more than I usually would.

Some stupid ones I object to cos of weird spelling or slang, such as kabob and bucko ffs.

But you liked BOBA and CATBOAT?

Thing is over don’t know why I am using hide tags, sorry.

Wordle in two, missed one measly letter in my first guess ffs. Starting to get annoyed how much luck is involved.

II try to have no goal in Wordle other than to finish before I run out of guesses and to type in some cool words along the way.

I & I

Which is exactly what just happened after I typed that.

Boba is fine, those are the bubbles in bubble tea. catboat i had to mash the keys t get that - even gogling for an answer didnt bring it. WTF is a catboat.

it's in the sequel to totoro

i also lucked into CATBOAT and my first thought was this: https://gifmovie.tumblr.com/post/45744018521/i-should-buy-a-boat

i wonder how much playing the bee on a tablet contributes to a better experience
because it’s easier to smash the screen keys

can’t believe I typed AIRWOLF before AIRFLOW lol

Ha! Also, what no WIFI?

Got to Genius on my own steam, mostly, although I did have to look up one last work because I was misspelling it,, then looked at hints for QB, got within two but then didn't want to bother so looked at Shunn.

James, I expect because that word is officially hyphenated.

Not the word I was thinking about.

my buddy is beta testing

Each guess must be a word (of any length). The similarity value is how similar word2vec thinks your word is to the secret word. The highest possible similarity is 100 (indicating that the words are identical and you have won). You will need more than six guesses. You will probably need dozens of guesses.

Words may be any part of speech. It's tempting to think only of nouns, since that is how normal semantic word-guessing games work. Don't get caught in the trap! Since our Word2Vec data set contains some proper nouns, guesses are case-sensitive. But I removed all but lower-case words from the secret word set, and if your word matches the secret word but for case, you win anyway. So if you want to know if the word is more like nice or Nice, you can ask about both.

Prior art. I discovered French Toast about 20 years ago, and immediately knew that I had to tell Dominus about it. He replied that in fact he and Ranjit had invented it 20 years before that, and called it "Plenty Questions".

But I wasn't thinking of French Toast when I invented this. Instead, I was thinking about Wordle and Worldle and about the dimensionality of data sets. I considered Filmle, a movie guessing game: You say "The Matrix", it says "Keanu Reeves has a bacon number of 3 where bacon is the lead actor in the target film." (and so on for Carrie-Ann Moss, Laurence Fishburne, and Hugo Weaving for actors at corresponding billings). But I don't care about movies. Too bad, because IMDB actually has exactly the data that you would need to implement it in a really easy form. Then I remembered word2vec, and here we are.

(Yes, I expect it to be way too hard -- that's not a bug, it's inherent vice. I promise that I have been able to solve some of these).

https://semantle.novalis.org/

i can't fucking win this.

anyway, also this:
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/

Wow -- I got the hang of it after a while, but Semantle is tough.

wordle - if you've been playing it a while, do 4-letter words + "s" come up much, or even at all? wondering if I can discount those from my guesses? Or is there a list somewhere of all previous answers that doesn't give away future answers...?

the source for wordle has two lists, one of which is all the answers, in sequence, in plain text (!), and there is another list with other valid words in it.

using rot13 so i'm technically not cheating - but spoiler tags for those who feel it's borderline: only 14 answers end in 's' so plurals are rare or nonexistent

thanks! spoiler tags::
Hmmm NOW I think perhaps it is cheating :D I think I just wondered if it was an unwritten rule or something as I noticed they didn't seem to come up despite me trying to eliminate them. I might keep the information to myself

goddamnit enjoy your soon to be exclusive access to wordle you spelling bee weirdos

Wow too bad there aren't like a hundred clones and variants already out there

o wait

there are

It's not going to be paywalled, at least not yet:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/31/22911274/wordle-new-york-times-free-word-game-acquisition

Fuck that I'm going back to text twist xp

so here's my friends notes about semantle:

IIRC, word2vec considers words that are found in similar contexts. So,
while red and green might be opposites, we would often see "a red vase"
and "a green vase". But while we might see "he took the stairs to the
second floor" vs "he took the elevator to the second floor", we would
never see "he took the elevation to the second floor". I guess this
can't be all there is too it, because "he took the elevate" is no beter
than "he took the elevation", but that's the intuition.

It's also one new word per day.

The purchase, announced by The Times on Monday, reflects the growing importance of games, like crosswords and Spelling Bee, in the company’s quest to increase digital subscriptions to 10 million by 2025

The weird thing about my attempt at semantle was one of my first guesses was "lift." I didn't mean it in the elevator sense but was surprised it was only 20/100 comparable to "elevator" despite being another term for elevator

word2vec is apparently not good with brit slang?
https://wiki.pathmind.com/word2vec

Lol i tried again today and it is completely impenetrable. Wrote my friend and told him this needs tweaking

yeah i couldn't finish it.

after about 50 guesses, the highest i got was 33.56, couldn't get any closer than that :/ I'm not sure I totally get how it works.

Semantle is killing mw!

I got as far as like 25 points when i did spell... magic didnt work but awhile (as in, "sit a spell") was higher. Am I doing it right?

Oh and yeah it dont like UK/AU spelling either FWIW

The word you’re going for is conceptually connected in a way that makes sense to an algorithm. So today, the closest i got was 30% with
Speedy
Time
virtue

Have now gotten 44.18 similarity with “graciousness” but “grace” was only 30.44. idgi

QB in 8 minutes, personal record

Have now gotten 44.18 similarity with “graciousness” but “grace” was only 30.44. idgi

The best I've managed today is 48.38 with impatience. Totally stuck there, though.

Fittingly.

Got all but one on SB real fast but I had no idea what an otters den was and had to cheat.

OK, got the Semantle in 172 (though many of those were random words just to get the hang of the damn thing). I was halfway there but didn't realize it...

it's gonna be such a nightmare once the original wordle wordlist ends and the ezerskified word list takes over

today as word 228 out of 2315, 5.7 more years before it runs out

I'm going to be real and say that I don't understand the fun of guessing a random ass word without any clues, and kind of think Wordle and its variants are wildly dumb.

And like, I love word games. I just don't think it's fun, at all.

doing the same thing using 6-letter words and using /usr/share/dict/words as a source would give you 15066 words, but they include things like zythum and zonule and worrit and wummel (and 'wordle'!)

but... you get clues. you narrow down based on the letters that have already been evaluated, using your knowledge of English words as well as the process of elimination. it's basically a word-game form of the popular game "Clue."