Defend The Indefensible: Wordle

If ever a word should have been solved in one try--I took five--it's "karma." Sorry, John Lennon.

It seems like the bulk of people came to Wordle very late in its run (the first time I remember seeing results shared en masse was somewhere in the 190s), so I have to imagine many of the most familiar words had already dropped off the list before people noticed it.

I thought the dude (and his partner) pared down the list to 2,500 or so familiar five-letter words, and then hit a randomizer that essentially set the word list for the next 6+ years. So there's no reason to think that earlier words were any more familiar than current or later ones.

Someone mentioned that upthread. I didn't know the backstory.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/does-wordle-prove-that-we-can-have-nice-things-on-the-internet

Wardle's background is interesting.

If Place sounds like a minimalist conceptual-art project, that may be because Wardle trained as a minimalist conceptual artist. He grew up in South Wales and moved to Oregon, in 2008, to get an M.F.A. in digital art. One of his few non-digital pieces, an installation in a physical gallery, was called “This Button.” People who entered the gallery saw a red button on a pedestal, and a timer showing how long it had been since the button had been pressed. “Imagine you walk in, alone, and the timer has been going for two days, and counting,” Wardle said recently. “You’re faced with a choice—you can have the momentary satisfaction of pressing the button, but you’ll be throwing that streak away, erasing all the restraint of however many strangers came before you. I found that to be an interesting tension.” His classmates didn’t. “They just walked up one by one, pressed the button, and went, ‘I don’t get it.’ ”

Place sounds like yourworldoftext. Speaking of which, does it (and its 77 page) still exist?

How common is it not to get the word in six attempts? Has anyone ever not managed to solve it?

My wife tipped me off to Heardle, which asks you to guess the song in as few tries as possible, with each attempt offering a little bit more of the track. The two I've done so far were different degrees of frustrating. The first stumped me a few tries in, until I guessed it was Marilyn Manson's "Beautiful People," which was wrong; it turned out to be Kanye's "Black Skinhead," which I had only heard once years ago but which bears a striking resemblance to the Manson song. The second one I eventually guessed correctly was Ariana Grande, but only after I got to her voice, plus the fact that I half remembered she had a hit that interpolated "My Favorite Things."

xp -- I've missed one in 65 played

thanks for the heads up, this looks very tantalizing - but you gotta promise: no more spoilers from now on!

xp to Josh re Heardle

Xp to getter - I've missed 2 out of 72 played. Generally get them in 3 or 4 though.

I’ve been playing it for a few months and missed the word once

The other day I got it on my first attempt- logically I understand this indicates nothing but luck, and getting it in two is far more impressive - but it was a real rush!

the only one I've missed is "VIVID"...I actually had to abandon it because I could not think of a single word that fit what I had left. the double letters are really tricky!

I think that's the one I missed.

I eventually got it, but it took me a long time to puzzle out.

I gave up on wordle about a while back, tried heardle for a few days but realised I was so out of touch with current music it was largely pointless, I tried a country one that was just guessing really...

So the only one I'm doing at the moment is worldle, which gives you the silhouette of a country and tells you how far away in distance you are from the right place. Without scale for context it can be quite tricky - the other day I just couldn't work out which Polynesian island it was in time.

My favorite thing was the pissy person on Twitter who scraped the word list from the code and made a bot that would post spoilers for tomorrow's word on everyone's results, I have never been irritated by something so much that it made me go out of my way to be an ass to people I don't know

― castanuts (DJP), Wednesday, March 2, 2022 11:05 AM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol this is geniusly evil

todays quordle was bullshit tbh

Seemed ok to me? Spoiler tag which one u don’t think is a word

i found today’s quordle tricky but not junto tricky

lost at wordle for the first time a couple weeks ago. casualty of hard mode where i had something like SPI_E on the third turn and it could have been SPITE or SPIKE or SPINE or SPICE but i didn't have enough rounds to check all 4 and was locked in. i've been reconsidering hard mode ever since, because ideally what you'd want to do in that situation is burn a move on like, TRICK which would narrow it down to something solvable within the 6 turns. but the fact that it's called "hard mode" keeps my ego from turning it off

i was pretty proud of my point histogram with modal score of 3 (just barely) in 100 games but i saw some smart people posting their histograms on twitter and was kind of shocked--one guy had median score of 3

I’ve never turned “hard mode” on but I don’t need to cause I will never play any other way, I hate strategy & don’t want to make guesses that aren’t real guesses. I don’t mind if I lose this way

Also doubt it makes the game appreciably harder except in that 1 time in 100 that you really haven’t narrowed down the possibilities within 5 guesses

Conversely I love playing non hard mode and trying to find just the right word to eliminate as many possibilities as, er, possible.

I’ve never turned “hard mode” on but I don’t need to cause I will never play any other way, I hate strategy & don’t want to make guesses that aren’t real guesses. I don’t mind if I lose this way

this, i want each guess to be "real"

hard mode definitely does make it harder since it constrains you (and creates the 'winner's curse' of getting too many letters right early on) (there is one way that hard more makes it easier which is blocking you from making mistakes) but imo it's not really the difficulty per se, but that it does so in a non-interesting way. in the sense that it blocks off subtle "two steps ahead" sacrifice type moves like the one i described above. wordle's a trivially easy game when you think of the goal as not losing; hard more on/off will only ever make the difference between a long-run win rate off 99% or 100%. but if you think of the goal as solve in 3 as often as possible its actually pretty tricky and thinking about it that way is what sustained my interest

i don't tweet the score and while the tweeting is obviously what made it viral i don't really see any communal aspect to it bc no one seems to interact with each other's wordle tweets they just post them into the void. having said that a friend texts me his score every morning and it's such a trivial thing but it's brought us closer

todays quordle was bullshit tbh

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac), Tuesday, 8 March 2022 08:46 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

100%

I would never in a million years have guess this to be a controversial quordle

Hello my name is Mikko an i am 8 year old,my record is now,snake2
2342,i am treining abaut 1/2 year.
[nokia 3310]
― Mikko, Friday, 1 August 2003 13:28 (eighteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

from Snake and Snake 2 (greatest thread in the history of forums)

xps I always get wordle in 4, it’s become a running joke with my friend who I text scores with. Everyone’s getting 3s I’m a 4 guy

Another small pleasure is choosing a different start word every day, recently: mirth, abuzz, banjo, pixel, quack, zebra, cloud, bleak

I would never in a million years have guess this to be a controversial quordle

― wins, Tuesday, March 8, 2022 5:42 AM (fifty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's one of the few daily ones i've lost since starting a few weeks ago. combination of word with a rare letter "dozen" and (much worse) word with 3 of the same letter "poppy." it's hard to do if you didn't guess P early and often. none of the other words have a P but they all have rabbit holes you can go down (S_IFF, __AIL, _O_EN) and if you burn multiple guesses on any of them you're not going to have room to figure out poppy. my partner had the right idea with it but guessed "mommy" instead.

here's a practice quordle i had a while ago that was so brutal i had to save it:

4️⃣3️⃣ WHITE - SEIZE
7️⃣8️⃣ SHYLY - EPOXY

wordle freaks on twitter are going to riot when they get "shyly"

See I get that makes it slightly tricky but “bullshit” seems way off, nothing there that isn’t playing fair with the solver imo

fwiw I didn’t guess a P until I solved the puzzle on guess 7, & all I had in place was the O

idk I’ve only been playing quordle for a week and I still feel like I’ve done harder ones

I had the O in place and one P, and one guess left. Why I went for POOPY instead of POPPY I still don't know

this is typical hibernian-poking from wins, he likes to suggest that bogwandering paddies with my dialect dont speak the queen's correctly, i irge everyone to ignore this known troll

Just did quordle for the first time. Was sweating a bit at the end but got over the line. Not a bad performance for an over caffeinated wet-brained old div with hangover. I found it much easier than today's semantle.

thats right xp

I find quordle really easy and octordle and secordle easier still as after 12 guesses or whatever you can usually work out what all the words are

Has anyone ever used ‘eared’ as a standalone adjective, without ‘dog-‘ or ‘long-‘ or something preceding it? Because fuck you fake Wordle.

from reading the eiki on taonte ching yesterday i know that 'dan' means long ears fyi

got nothing else

wiki of tao te ching that is but

The commentary about today's Quordle made me go check it out:

7 5
4 6

🤷🏾‍♂️

I just solved an entire Octordle for the first time.

i don't tweet the score and while the tweeting is obviously what made it viral i don't really see any communal aspect to it bc no one seems to interact with each other's wordle tweets they just post them into the void. having said that a friend texts me his score every morning and it's such a trivial thing but it's brought us closer

― flopson, Tuesday, March 8, 2022 4:17 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah, this is the weird thing about the social-media virality: Because there's also a (socially enforced) prohibition against spoilers, it's impossible to do anything more than just post the score. There have been days when I have wanted to talk about the word or how I solved it, and the fact that it's such a communal activity makes me think that others would be interested, but the only permissible way to do that is to wait until the next day, when it no longer feels relevant.

We post scores in a channel on my work Slack and people discuss spoilers in threads; seems to work fine in a closed group, not so fine in a cowboy free-for-all environment like Twitter

I lost interest in Wordle, but like flopson there was a period where a couple friends were also doing it and we would group chat about it, it was nice (xp)

I just tried Worldle for the first time--looks fun in general, though today's was dead easy

So in the two weeks I've been doing worldle there have been about 4 I've known straight off the bat, and 3 or 4 I haven't got so there is a big variation.

Islands are tough, I've found, despite them being the ones that don't have any straight (ish) lines.

yeah yesterday was an island and I was completely lost and guessing pacific islands at random

Today's was easy, possibly the most distinctive small country shape on the globe.

Often I don't "know" it but I have a vague recognition that at least leads me to the right continent/region and then I get it in a couple more guesses.