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

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."

it's exactly the popular game "word mastermind" but with 5 letter words

it still comes down to just guessing the correct word
any strategy is just to ensure you get the most clues out of the words you supply

which is why i prefer absurdle - you are playing against an algorithm
and you are actually _playing_, not just guessing

for guessing i still prefer the good ol spelling bee

I dunno, maybe it's too open-ended for me. I like this game TypeShift, love Apelli

Lol sorry dumb thumbs

I love Spelling Bee, love the TypeShift game, but when I have to guess the letters rather than make words from those that are pre-selected and given to me, I completely lose interest.

Yeah tbr Wordle is NOT a word game, its more of a number/strategy pattern game.

“wordle is not even a real word!” - sam

It's actually a roguelike

can't see how ppl would stand over the Sam ezerzky personal daily "this word counts because I say so Nyan" puzzle but take issue with wordle as not a real word puzzle tbh

and I like both ftr

ye sure now it's not because one is popular

I like both too, but SB is more interesting. Wordle just involves finding a word that doesn’t use most of the letters of your first two or three choices, and takes about 2 minutes

also nobody ever yells “what do you mean … is not a word!!” while playing wordle which is half the fun

My other half must be so fed up with me yelling LORRY IS A WORD YOU TWAT every day at SB.

NEWSIE WEWSIE IS A WORD YOU HADDOCKS ARSE

CATBOAT? WTF IS CATBOAT?!

lol

Semantle is very frustrating. 42.81 for 'day' and 40.65 for 'night', which is ridiculous once you see the secret word (I finally gave up)

First time playing Semantle. 362 guesses. Shame that the share button doesn't work.

My buddy’s response to my telling him semantle needs some onsite guidance to be playable:

I actually had another idea, which should only take an evening to implement: you click on three words, and it shows you where the target word would be on the plane formed by those words. (Well, the nearest point on the plane.) Hard to visualize, I know, but once you see it, you will understand it intuitively. I hope.