Semantle: Can you think like a computer?

^ That was me today. Got 999, then did another 100 guesses, then gave up.

it was my third guess after the 999 that did it, but like I say if you can't be brilliant be lucky.

I've now got 6 of the top 10 and 12 of the top 20. I hate this game.

Found it on guess #288. My 999 was guess #191, and I was going to give up on guess #291, so that was lucky.

instead i was trapped in “complexity” as an attribute of an object and didn’t get out.
― Fizzles, Thursday, February 24, 2022 8:05 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I did the same yesterday and ultimately didn't get it. I would have kept working at it but accidentally restarted my browser so I lost yesterday's page.

Onto today's!

Oh well okay I just completely randomly got it on guess #69 after dancing around a parallel track for about 6 guesses.

I solved Semantle #26 in 73 guesses.

Much better than yesterday's though I did hit a synonym rut for a bit, needed to widen my net rather than trying *every single variation* of a word. I needed to look at types of scholar rather than trying to hit every direct synonym for it, of course I did - also needed not to try every school of philosophy when I hit philosopher (while it could have been 'sophist' it was highly unlikely to have been 'deconstructionist', come on brain.

61! fucking finally. jesus. i had history on guess 16 annoyingly. the hook into this was dream from which i got to memory.

did it in about 90. Route was sort of book, librarian, scribe, archivist

I solved Semantle #26 in 38 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 8.99. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #26. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 30.92 (126/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org/

Route was artist, writer, biographer

I solved Semantle #27 in 58 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 2.12. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #5. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 29.48 (775/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org/

Felt relatively straightforward - or as straightforward as Semantle ever gets - real glad i didn't get too trapped in wrong guess hell today!

Yep, pretty straightforward, got it in 39.

I solved Semantle #27 in 75 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 0.84. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #21. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 13.65. https://semantle.novalis.org/

I solved Semantle #27 in 39 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 3.55. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #7. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 0.66.

i guess i'm really really good at this now (day 2)

I solved Semantle #27 in 66 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 19.54. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #2. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 21.95.

By my third guess I was hitting up around 960 but had to fire about fifty synonyms at it before I got the right word (and, annoyingly, it was a slight variant on one I'd already guessed)

What was #25? I got utterly stuck and I can't see how to see previous answers.

Guayaquil, #25 was costly.

Guayaquil, #25 was fucking brutal.

Wow I was not even close! Or rather, I thought I was close but the several top-10 words I had were not leading me towards that at all. And yet I can totally see it, now that I've been told. This is a great game.

I solved Semantle #27 in 92 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 2.65. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #21. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 13.65.

Another one of those “wall of greens” situations where I got into the 99x’s early on but struggled to make the leap to the secret word.

hadn't played in forever but got it in 80 with a friend playing with me

can see how it would be quite fun played in company

33 today, new pb!

massive struggle today. hanging around in the low 20s, stuck in an area i know isn’t the right area but *is* adjacent. got to 800s with guess 54. but that’s been my peak, currently on 71. a grind.

I solved Semantle #27 in 18 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 4.12. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #2. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 36.07 (943/1000).

got lucky today. hit a high green on my second guess.

I solved Semantle #27 in 43 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 0.07. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #20. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 30.04 (805/1000).

I got frustrated just 60 guesses in and used a thesaurus, despite being at 995 or so. Feel regret and shame.

f’ that. i’ll use any means necessary to get that damn word. and often i’ve found the thesaurus is not your friend but your enemy.

yes i’m still stuck what of it.

I solved Semantle #27 in 172 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 1.23. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #25. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 55.82 (995/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org/

I solved Semantle #27 in 138 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 2.37. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #31. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 30.74 (838/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org/

Definitely feel like I'm getting worse at this. Took me ages to get anywhere close today, though, so a lot of wasted words.

I solved Semantle #27 in 29 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 8.49. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #3. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 56.01 (996/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org/

hit the top 100 on my 5th guess and then it was basically a breeze

When I play this on my phone I suck, when I play it on my laptop I'm good.

Idk why that is

yeah, can't play it on the phone at all

Woah, first time I've found the word after generally hundreds of guesses on other days before giving up.

I solved Semantle #27 in 9 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 7.52. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #3. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 34.17 (918/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org/

I solved Semantle #27 in 253 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 2.83. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #42. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 51.72 (993/1000).

Another day with a ton of near-synonyms. I didn't have a method to hone in on the right word. interesting that few of the similar words used the definition of "going up in value".

abanana i’m still in that hellscape

I thought this was going to be a breeze: green at guess 7, 991 at guess 14. Now in the hundreds.

here we are. dante’s semantic purgatory.

990s would be paradiso tbf.

980s are “you still need to make another jump fucko”

Without giving too much away I'm stuck in a cul de sac of love, what about you?

I solved Semantle #27 in 143 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 3.62. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #7. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 46.47 (987/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org/

Had to resort to Roget in the end.

xxp That's the annoying thing, sometimes 980s are "another jump fucko" and sometimes they're "this word has a lot of synonyms, try them all". Hell, sometimes 998 is "another jump fucko, this time at right angles, possibly through a dimension you can't see".

Anyway I got today's earlier but then I checked this thread and couldn't remember the answer so I went to the site, typed a few guesses I remembered passing through earlier and still couldn't jog my memory, so pressed "give up", and then realised I'd buggered up my stats with a "gave up" (did it on work PC earlier, on laptop now). Not that it matters.

Without giving too much away I'm stuck in a cul de sac of [Hidden text. Tap to view], what about you?

Various xps: yeah i still don’t get how pretty tight synonyms can sometimes score so low - like, does the neural net write a different hierarchy of associations based on its selected primary definition? So if it’s looking for say, “croak” (frog sound) then it won’t be interested in “die” of “perish” - sorry if this is dumb or incoherent, still learning to think like a computer here

There is some mention on the site about polysemy* causing low scores - I guess the multiple uses mean they're found in different contexts more often and therefore aren't counted as semantically similar. Whereas a usual English-speaking brain would count the meanings additively, the computer penalises them via subtraction. Or something.

(Interestingly, 'polysemous' is not an accepted word in the corpus.)

Aw, nuts! I forgot to finish yesterday’s puzzle, which I woulda likely nailed in a few more guesses. My first guess was “love”, which I think was in the top 100? Green anyway. And I got to the 990s pretty quick. Anyhow, no braggin rights.

8 sleep -1.14 (cold)

are negatives supposed to be possible?

xps, I think it depends on what contexts it sees most in its corpus of example sentences, which the FAQ says are mostly taken from news articles?

So it doesn't deliberately pick a specific meaning of "croak" but it probably won't rate "croak"/"die" very high as it would be unlikely to appear with that meaning in many of its sample news articles. Meanwhile, there'll be a lot of words with more obviously similar meanings to "die" which it will have grouped "die" with instead.

Or the other day, when the word was "level" it didn't rate "flat" or "even" very highly although they're close synonyms in one not-very-newsworthy context but the 900s were full of words which might appear before "level" in news articles like "higher", "lower", "raise" etc.

(OK, the "before" part still mystifies me, regarding when it scores synonyms highly, vs not necessarily same-in-meaning but interchangeable-in-sentence words like antonyms, vs words which might appear nearby or just in the same sorts of article.)

This is basically what emil.y said except longer and less clear, but I don't think it deliberately subtracts scores for multiple meanings, it's just the algorithm doesn't understand multiple meanings at all, so the meanings it doesn't see as often don't rate highly at all. But I guess it may also penalise even the most common meaning, because there's effectively more noise in the data set from the meanings it doesn't know what to do with.

I solved Semantle #28 in 145 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 11.67. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #63. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 74.70 (999/1000). https://semantle.novalis.org/