Semantle: Can you think like a computer?

If you can, switch to Firefox. Not for Semantle. But because with Firefox, you can install an adblocker like ublock origin, making everything much more pleasant.

I gave up but I like the game, I'll try again tomorrow...

It doesn't know the word aeroplane

Now that it's the next day, I can say that, for instance, the day the answer was CANDLE, I got my highest hits from (iirc, I've actually forgotten already) ALTAR and, like, words relating to textiles you might find in a religious setting. I think one of them was WIMPLE, in fact. Those prompts made me fixate on textiles and wardrobe items, when I apparently should have been expanding to other things found in a ritual setting? Did anyone else get CANDLE and if so, what was your approach?

the 'algorithm' here is a neural net, they are famously not amenable to reverse engineering and as david said each word is represented as 300 numbers.

Then I can't help but think that the dynamic between the player and the game will be similar to other situations where the reward is entirely erratic and unpredictable. If the reward is powerful enough and is dispensed often enough to reinforce, the player will continue to seek it and may even become convinced they discovered the secret method for winning. If the reward is too weak or too infrequent to be reinforcing the player abandons the game.

i bailed before i got there as it was driving me nuts but i got highest with FIREPLACE, PYRE, FLAME. Couldn't find my way to where I was supposed to go. i have a funnier story about todays, but I will wait.

it should be noted that, having won once, i am particularly interested in seeing if i have figured out the internal logic somehow or if that was a fluke.
given that there are people (on this thread even) who are maintaining some consistency, I don't think it's an erratic or unpredictable puzzle so much as it requires access to a specific perspective, one that i'm having issues attaining.

My close guesses were LAMP and LANTERN, which you would *think* would give me a good basis for getting candle. I instead spiralled into guessing SEARCHLIGHT, SPOTLIGHT, LAMPSTAND, HEADLAMP and other stupid things, before taking a break and finally having CANDLE come into my mind.

I did also get a glitch where one of my closer guesses didn't come up with the green indicator bar, but instead said "cold" - I can't remember what word it was so this isn't a good bug report, I guess, but I figured I'd mention it seeing as we have the creator here.

gonna start c+ping my answers to post here post game

Can we just put the answer into one of those other sites and see the map of the close words or do we just keep guessing at the semantle site?

if you're seeing a way to do that, i'd be curious!

I don't think it's an erratic or unpredictable puzzle so much as it requires access to a specific perspective, one that i'm having issues attaining.

This is where I am, I'm by no means faulting the game. Actually some of the posts made since I mentioned my frustration earlier have helped me already shift my perspective for next time.

Yeah I think I'll give it a proper go tomorrow, as my initial confusion has been somewhat dispelled.

emil,y: Thanks for the report. The word you found wasn't a "normal" word (meaning, a word in the 370k-word all-lowercase wordlist that I am using to generate the top 1000). A friend of mine found this a few days ago with "winningest". It's weird to have two word lists, but I really didn't like some of the garbage in the full 3 million words of the word2vec data set I'm using (in one case, one of the top 200 words was some reporter's email address!). To reproduce: capitalize the first letter of today's 999/1000 word. I just changed the code to handle this case -- now it prints "????" with an explanation on hover.

It would be nice to display a map of the close words -- but "mapping" a 300-dimensional space is tricky. I guess I could run another round of principle component analysis on the top 1000, and take the top 2 components.... But I don't think that's going to happen this week.

er, today's 996/1000 word.

61 today, and I cheated by using a thesaurus at the very end.

I don't know why I have zero interest in posting my wordle results but I do feel like reporting on this one, I think because it's less predictable how hard it's going to be.

Wordle doesn’t really need a strategy beyond doing the obvious whereas this most definitely seems to require one.

It's a bit like Scattergories in the way it tends to lock down your brain at a certain point, so that you know there are other words out there but your brain fixates on the ones you've already come up with and can't get past them.

Yeah same

Yep

Cool. I just got it in 6, but that feels like beginner's luck!

― jaymc, Monday, February 7, 2022 4:09 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yesterday I had the fortune of randomly guessing "lantern" for the second word (after "frog"), which led me to "candle" soon after.

Today I got to the closest match in about 100, but then got stuck. Finally decided to cheat by using a thesaurus, which got me to the finish line.

63 guesses for me today - guesses included the 994, 997, 998 and 999th closest words - took a while to land on 1000, even when I could clearly see the pattern

when does the new word drop? Midnight? LIke the...like that other puzzle?

It would be really interesting to know the optimal, say, six words to start with to narrow down the possibilities.

107 words ... AND I used a thesaurus. The thing that broke it open for me was actually just free-associating. Not sure how I got from WHOOPSIE to ERROR but the answer came relatively quickly after that.

*************SPOILERS IN POST ABOVE SORRY*****************

will try to get a mod to fix

midnight utc it says

got stuck on 940 jigsaw and 952 difficult, eventually started typing in random words from the top of the page! got to 999 but still had to hit the thesaurus, maybe it would have come to me eventually. take home lesson: words in the mid 900s are not necessarily at all helpful.

(got it in 147. also confused by lukas' post as those two words are nowhere near the answer.)

97 but I thought I was going to have to give up even with the help of a thesaurus. Got 4 words over 900 reasonably quickly but stalled out hard after that.

This game is going to ruin my life. Which is a compliment!

lol the mod got creative with my post

Ha!

81 today!
I hit on 932/1000 but other synonyms didn't seem to get that high at all. (There is one missing from the dictionary btw, it didn't recognise marvellous .) Once I got in the final ballpark I didn't look up any synonyms (I don't really consider that cheating if it jogs your memory, as unless you're really close it's unlikely to be one of those maybe?) I got the 997 and 998 before hitting on it.

Oh just realised it was probably a UK/US spelling thing in the 'missing' word.

Today was my first time doing this. It took 56 goes to get the word. I didn't use a thesaurus.

I have no interest in playing Wordle. I think this is probably because of people posting their scores on Twitter, which was annoting and how I first heard of it, rather than any intrinsic qualities of the game itself. This, however, is great and I plan to play again. Thanks, David!

I gave up on today's and had genuine difficulty understanding why my relatively "closest" word (27.14) was any closer to the correct word than many of the much further away words. It seems like until you get a much "closer" guess, the reasons are not apparent for "closeness"

Even so, some of the “closer” words are genuinely mystifying.

Sometimes a word will be close in one form but far away in a different form, e.g. let's say cheater vs cheated vs cheating vs cheat could all have wildly different closeness scores.

yes, and after i gave up i tried some synonyms of the winner that were "cold," while others were very close. and i couldn't find where my closest guess connected to the winner. anyway i got bored of wordle pretty quickly and this is way better.

Oof, today was a tricky one for me. Took me 127 and I did resort to thesaurus cheating at one point. It did give me an important semantic turn that I probably wouldn't have taken without it, though. I was stuck on 'hard', 'tough' etc, thesaurus gave me the idea to try 'critical', which then gave me a new line of enquiry.

I would say over ten of my tries were me getting frustrated and typing in things like 'shit', 'fuck', 'death', 'kill', so maybe I could claim 117 instead, heh.

I must be at a hundred guesses now and I can’t get any closer than a similarity score just shy of 21. FML

Yeah, this is killing me today.

Similarity stuck at 44 and I cannot think of any more synonyms

got it finally. only took me 511 guesses.

I've got similarity of 24/26/34, all are closely related ... and no idea where to go next.

Yeah this one was brutal.

probably put a couple hundred guesses into this fella during a boring work meeting and got no higher than 566 (or so) (my only “getting warmer@ guess also)

then had another go at home and got it in 8

have often found this with cryptic crosswords, where a change of scene will reshuffle the neurons and offer new insights

this game is impossible and makes no sense

Best one in a *long* while. if it wasn't for the heat I wouldn't be awake now to trawl through it!

I solved Semantle #171 in 34 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 20.90. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #3. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 16.70.

Semantle fans, thanks for all of your support. Thanks to you, I was able to sell Semantle and try out a new career as an indie game developer. My next game is out now!

It's called Surfwords. Like Semantle, it's a very difficult word game. Unlike Semantle, it's played in realtime, and you'll be lucky to last thirty seconds.

I think you'll find it less frustrating (or at least differently frustrating) than Semantle: the word lists are carefully curated, and the game tries really hard to give you words that you will know -- but is willing to accept more obscure words if you enter them.

It's available now on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux: https://surfwords.com/.

Great to hear buddy

will try this out later

I've beta tested Surfwords a lot and David's not kidding about it being challenging.

I daresay anyone with solid scrabble dictionary tastes is going to find this to be their cuppa tea. Try it a bit slowed down to start and see if you can get up to speed. I never could!

A key thought going into playing Surfwords is that Dave was inspired by Super Hexagon and wanted to keep the same twitchy gameplay but have it activate your vocabulary centers.

Separate conversation that I'm curious about the board's opinion on: Dave is selling Surfwords for $5. Considering that money goes to the one-man programming team, does that seem like a reasonable price? Who here still buys games a la carte on the Apple/Android store?

Anyone still playing?

I solved Semantle #199 in 40 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of -3.91. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #31. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 28.37 (714/1000).

Better than yesterday's, when I had political in my first ten guesses but didn't think to try party for another 200 guesses or so.

Tried Surfwords, didn't like it. Sorry.

Thanks for the reminder! Haven't played in ages, having a full-time job now is probably the reason,but seem to have hit the ground running....

I solved Semantle #199 in 15 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of -1.24. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #9. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 49.99 (999/1000).

The $5 price tag, peanuts as it is, and totally needed to support the developer, does put me off trying Surfwords, esp as it appears not to be ti many people's taste so far.

Bit more of a struggle today. One of those where I had early greens, then drifted away from it:
I solved Semantle #200 in 117 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 22.41. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #8. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 21.00.

chicken not being anywhere in the top 1000 for today’s feels like a mistake lol

I got it in 20 today which is good for me. Lately I've been resorting to hints once I pass 200 guesses which happens frustratingly often. Thought yesterday's was really hard.

I solved Semantle #255 in 171 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 3.88. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #13. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 55.68 (941/1000).

really weird one today

I solved Semantle #259 in 26 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 19.38. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #26. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 17.27. first one in a while. don’t think I ever guessed the word without having a green first. went from “flower” to “fresh” and “clean” (both with 23. similarity) to bingo

better than me, took me 116. rarely takes me less than 200 guesses these days. yesterday I had "convince" early on but didn't try "convinced" for another 200 guesses.

I solved Semantle #260 in 8 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 14.06. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #6. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 51.46 (984/1000).

I also played yesterday but didn't get a word higher than 40.00 in maybe 70 words. Didn't realize it would change before you finish

After Semantle, I quit my job to make games full-ish time. My latest is called Deco Deck, and it's a logic puzzle like Two Not Touch. If you like that sort of thing, you'll probably like this one. Give it a try -- it's available for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, and Mac.

I will give that a try, my kakuro addiction is boring me to death and I need something new!

I tried it, pretty neat - looks good and it's certainly challenging, the mini was easy but I needed hints for the large after playing for nearly an hour!

one thing I'm curious about for games like this with a single unique solution - how do you generate the games? I presume there's an algorithm but I wouldn't know how to begin to design one.