[HN Gopher] Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?
Author : dontwordle
Score : 348 points
Date : 2022-05-31 17:25 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dontwordle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dontwordle.com)
| [deleted]
| giyanani wrote:
| Jane street had a puzzle related to this, called eldrow [1], a
| few months ago.
|
| The gist is you're trying to find the worst sequence of (hard
| mode) guesses possible for any word in the wordle set.
|
| Their site shows submissions of up to 16 words and claims 17 is
| impossible [2]. I've been trying to do the same, but have yet to
| cut the search space enough[3].
|
| Ex: calculating the worst chain for jazzy (with a 1000 word
| subset of the full word list) took an m1 core 1 hour and resulted
| in the ten-word chain:
|
| civic, buggy, woody, array, leaky, mammy, fanny, happy, tasty,
| jazzy
|
| [1] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-index/ [2]
| https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-solution/ [3]
| https://github.com/roshangiyanani/wordle/blob/main/wordle/el...
| [deleted]
| KerrickStaley wrote:
| I was able to win by starting with the 3 guesses JUJUS, IMMIX,
| PZAZZ and going from there. These words were taking from the
| worst starting words list at
| https://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best...,
| which is a great writeup on optimal Wordle strategy.
| qrian wrote:
| Got it first try without undoing! Key was guessing the answer at
| like step 4 and reverse engineering it from the back.
|
| Don't Wordle 8 - SURVIVED Hooray! I didn't Wordle today! 6438 470
| 132 15 4 1 Undos used: 0
| ar_lan wrote:
| Absolutely - when they choose ridiculous words like "PATCH".
|
| WATCH HATCH BATCH CATCH LATCH MATCH
|
| There, I made 6 near-perfect guesses that would have cost me the
| game if I started with any one of them.
|
| This is so infuriating. I've lost I think 3 times already because
| of this type of word choice.
|
| _Note_ : This is only relevant if you play on the hard-mode,
| which enforces you re-use guessed letters that have already been
| signaled as correct.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| If the objective is to simply win rather than to win in the
| fewest number of tries, it can be valuable to spend a guess on
| exploring the problem space rather than guessing the word
| outright:
|
| Once you know every letter is correct except the W after the
| first guess, you can think of the missing letter in the
| possible correct words (HBCLMP), and put together a word like
| "CHOMP" to eliminate a lot of potential guesses.
| dwringer wrote:
| This is the most interesting aspect of Wordle to me, and the
| fact that hard-mode pretty much breaks it along with leading
| to random no-win situations basically ruined Wordle for me.
| Sure, I can just play it without hard mode - but then my
| friends and I aren't playing the same game.
| kibibyte wrote:
| Personally, I think that's what makes hard mode
| interesting, that it creates a sort of meta-game for
| figuring out a reliable way to avoid these pathological
| cases.
|
| It likely does mean you'll have to sacrifice a lower
| average guess count in favor of avoiding losses.
| ghaff wrote:
| It can be a somewhat different game depending on who you
| play "with." You probably follow different strategies if
| your primary strategy is not to lose vs. if you're strategy
| is to get the best score you can (as my group does). I
| figure that I will only go for two if I come out of the
| first guess with a lot of information. But otherwise, I do
| generally shoot for 3.
| zwieback wrote:
| Yeah, those are the worst ones. Rare, though, for me. Maybe ran
| into this a couple times and cost me my only loss so far.
| jquery wrote:
| Seems like you need to avoid guesses that can get you trapped
| like that, and therein lies the extra difficulty, no?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Wordle is simply not meant to be played on hard mode.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Yes, very silly to deliberately choose the mode that makes
| those words nigh impossible to guess, and then blame the word
| choice. If you want to make the game harder, try to bring
| down your guess count.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Meh, on normal mode it resolves down to can you solve a
| 5-letter anagram with placement clues. I pick a new
| starting word each day (definitely sub-optimal) and play
| hard mode.
|
| To each their own.
| zwieback wrote:
| That's me, sometimes it takes me many minutes to pick a
| starting word I haven't used yet, usually I look around
| the room until I spot something with five letters.
| function_seven wrote:
| I started one a few days ago with DIVVY.
|
| I was in the mood for either a crazy 1-guess win or a
| longer road otherwise.
|
| Game gets lame if you're always using "statistically
| engineered" guesses.
| gre wrote:
| Same, my first try LEDGE is not the optimal starting
| word.
| ghaff wrote:
| I usually do a two word opening sequence and go on from
| that in normal mode. Seems a reasonable compromise.
|
| I actually tired of the multiword Wordle "clones" for the
| reason that you say. I found you pretty much had to do a
| 3 or 4 word opening sequence and then mostly solve
| anagrams. Otherwise you end up wasting too many guesses
| trying to solve one word that has a lot of options.
| evandale wrote:
| It got way too easy and boring to use the same word. It's
| common amongst my friends to have multiple guesses queued
| up based on what the first word clues give them. I
| usually just yolo it and for once my awful memory works
| for me - I can barely remember my first guess from the
| previous day let alone the subsequent guesses so every
| day is a brand new game with a different strategy every
| day.
| ar_lan wrote:
| Why offer the mode, then?
| function_seven wrote:
| Oh those are the worst. There should be a term for that early
| success curse when playing it on Hard Mode. Getting a bunch of
| greens right off the bat can be a kiss of death.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I've heard "canyon of doom".
| mimimi31 wrote:
| I like it. I wonder if you could calculate how evil a
| solution would be in that regard, i.e. how likely you are
| to end up in a canyon. Maybe you could count how many
| substrings also occur in other valid words or something.
| ghaff wrote:
| I never dove into the topic any deeper but I suspect that
| there is probably cryptanalysis literature related to
| letter string frequency--or just take a dictionary and
| brute force a substring frequency analysis.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| While I agree with the spirit of your message, I feel you're
| addressing the title without actually having clicked it ;)
| ghaff wrote:
| Today was actually a fairly bad one for that.
|
| Even if you don't play hard mode it can be difficult to
| eliminate even 3 less common letters or so in one shot.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| Yeah, I could have had today's in two but it took me four
| moves because of the options with the third letter.
| [deleted]
| benatkin wrote:
| Usually I can solve a Wordle in a few minutes, but sometimes it
| takes a really long time, like 20 minutes if I don't give up.
| Two days ago I started playing during the last few minutes of
| the NBA game and didn't get the right answer until after the
| game was over. It took me 20 minutes and in the process I
| entered a word I didn't know about but that was in the
| dictionary. The correct word was a word I knew about but that
| was quite different from other words, including the one I
| guessed just by iterating through possible words.
|
| I still got it though. Those ones that rhyme with other words,
| especially if I blow through some of my guesses before finding
| most of the letters, are quick to answer but are typically the
| ones where I lose.
| dhosek wrote:
| I think that it's within appropriate etiquette if you reveal
| a past answer. I remember learning a couple new words on the
| way to VOUCH from _OUCH (MOUCH and LOUCH to be precise).
| testplzignore wrote:
| That's part of the fun! My current strategy is to never use "H"
| in my letter-elimination guesses, and never use "E" if I've
| already matched "S" and "A". I learned my lesson after winning
| on a 50/50 guess on one of the SHA_E days.
| sateesh wrote:
| Along with these ones that are hard for me to get right are
| when the letters are repeated.
| ghaff wrote:
| Repeated letters are one of the things that tend to get me.
| Others are:
|
| - Uncommon letters (I tend to mentally skip over them because
| they're uncommon.)
|
| - Words that differ from the "usual" pronunciation for a
| pattern, like having a glottal stop. When I'm pronouncing
| some pattern mentally in the usual way I can end up skipping
| past a valid word because I'm mentally pronouncing it wrong.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| I've stopped playing Wordle, after I missed it twice. My
| strategy was to use up letters of the alphabet in rough order
| of frequency: STONE, LAIRD, CHUMP, GAWKY, but occasionally
| varying the choice of the next word when I could think of a
| better one.
|
| If the word was PATCH, like most other times I would have
| played S(T)ONE L[A]IRD
| (C)(H)UM(P)
|
| after which PATCH is obvious. If you hadn't played that
| strategy, but you knew it was ?ATCH, you should divide up the
| candidate initial letters P, W, H, B, C, L, M: e.g. BLAME,
| CLAMP (neither of these is possible, but you would gain
| information). CLAMP would have confirmed it was PATCH. If
| neither word helped, you would at least know the unknown letter
| is W or H: two more guesses at worst.
|
| I did once fail to guess after six tries. The word was FOYER.
|
| The new game looks interesting, and the strategy winning
| (failing to choose the word) is less obvious.
| ar_lan wrote:
| This strategy doesn't work on hard mode, which is the main
| problem. I think it is essentially a separate game.
| zwieback wrote:
| Fun, clever and hard! Failed miserably first attempt.
| ghaff wrote:
| It does give you some sense for how you shrink the problem
| space fairly quickly--even when you're trying to avoid doing
| so.
| necovek wrote:
| It seems keyboard is unresponsive on FF mobile: is that just me?
| trebcon wrote:
| Works for me on FF Android
| ExtraE wrote:
| Works for me with FF on iOS.
| dontwordle wrote:
| Ah haven't tested that but thank you for sharing defects! Will
| investigate that tonight
| resonator wrote:
| Me neither. Firefox 97.2.0 on android.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I managed to figure out what the word most likely was after a few
| guesses (which were intended to be unlikely sets of letters but
| ended up narrowing the possibilities quickly), then undo a few
| times, then carefully made six guesses such that I never got a
| single green tile.
| [deleted]
| ajjenkins wrote:
| It would be nice if there was a Give Up button. I got down to 30
| possible words but could not for the life of me think of what
| they could be. I was craving that "Ohhhhh!!!!!" feeling when you
| see what the remaining possible words are.
| Aachen wrote:
| Agree on this. Some "give up" button that compares how far you
| got -- for example: 3rd guess x 20 valid words remaining = your
| score -- would make this easier to share and compare with
| others. Right now it's a fun toy but if you can't play together
| irl there's not an obvious compare method aside from giving the
| game state in a text message.
| yreg wrote:
| If you want to give up you can "cheat" by using a tool like
| https://word.tips/
| brk wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one. Got down to 20 possible words, but
| could not think of any that were valid choices given the
| letter/position constraints I had gotten to.
| zeepzeep wrote:
| literally 1 possible word after I entered 2 tries :/ I have
| no idea which word it is
| veryfancy wrote:
| "Created by Don Twordle"
| soneca wrote:
| I lost. Much harder for my poor non-native English speaker
| vocabulary. On third guess when it said I had 89 options, I
| couldn't think of more than one word.
|
| A feedback: the "you lost" screen passes too quickly, I couldn't
| read the word of the day.
| orphea wrote:
| It's almost the same for me! I didn't touch original Wordle
| because I don't know enough of vocabulary. Gave Don't Wordle a
| try. I guessed the word with 3rd try T_T
| dontwordle wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I have tried placing the Wordle word
| in a few different places, but haven't settled on a place that
| looks good and doesn't make the Game Over flow too
| complex/jarring. If you want to see the word, it is actually
| visible in the game, but not in an intuitive spot. When the
| game ends, the word counts next to each row become clickable
| (if the count is <=25). You can view the words possible
| remaining at that stage. The Wordle word will appear all green.
| jtamsut wrote:
| This is really well done.
| DungZeekFu wrote:
| I seem to have found a bug (or the word list is drastically
| different from Wordle). The game says I have 3 possible words
| remaining, but every Wordle solver website says I only have 2
| (and I only have 2 guesses remaining, so this is the difference
| between the game being winnable and not). The guesses I used for
| today were WRITE,BOODY,VOUCH,COMMA (and at this point the only
| two possible words are FOCAL and LOCAL, but it says that there
| are 3 possible words).
|
| Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318
| possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the
| dictionary in the code
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Possible: focal, local, socas
| phnofive wrote:
| There are three words that match - FOCAL, VOCAL, LOCAL - but of
| course you can't use 'V' in position one again, so that's a
| bug.
|
| There are two dictionaries, and the second contains 2309
| entries which are found in the 12974 entries of the first.
| skykooler wrote:
| I managed to win by discovering COXAL was a word, through brute
| force.
| npilk wrote:
| This may be a spoiler somehow, but one of my guesses was ZONAL,
| which appears to be valid based on what you've guessed so far?
| That could be the 3rd possible word. I don't know if it's in
| the Wordle list or not.
|
| EDIT: this isn't it - I missed the C in COMMA!
| ghaff wrote:
| No C in ZONAL.
| re wrote:
| > every Wordle solver website says I only have 2
|
| There are two different Wordle word lists--the set of legal
| guesses (roughly 13k) and the set of words in the solution list
| (roughly 2k). The latter list is curated to be a set of fair,
| interesting words, excluding plurals and more obscure words.
| Most Wordle solvers use knowledge of what words are in the
| Wordle solution database to pare down the set of "possible
| words". But with Don't Wordle, the "legal guess" list ends up
| being the more interesting one to show "remaining
| possibilities" for.
|
| https://scoredle.com/ is a site that shows possible remaining
| words using the larger "legal guess" list, so you can see that
| you could have also guessed "SOCAS".
|
| > Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318
| possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the
| dictionary in the code
|
| There were 2318 remaining possible words AFTER your first
| guess, which eliminated ~11k possibilities.
| layer8 wrote:
| When I played I tried BOCCA without knowing what it means (I
| was probably half-thinking of Boccia), and it was accepted.
|
| https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bocca
|
| Edit: The sibling with SOCAS is right.
| marcruser wrote:
| >The game says I have 3 possible words remaining, but every
| Wordle solver website says I only have 2
|
| Once you finish the game, if you have any rows with 25 or fewer
| valid words remaining (shown to the right of the row), the word
| count becomes clickable. It will open a modal that will show
| you the valid words remaining after that stage of the game. I
| went ahead and entered your same sequence of words, and the the
| other word remaining was SOCAS. That is a valid word in the NYT
| official Wordle game.
|
| >Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318
| possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the
| dictionary in the code
|
| There are different word dictionaries in the code.
| djsamseng wrote:
| SOCAS?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Safety of Cats at Sea?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The essence of any wildly popular single-player game = hard to
| win quickly + _very hard_ to lose.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yeah! That reminds me of something a game dev once taught me
| about single player games. (paraphrasing) "Almost all AAA
| titles are impossible _not_ to finish in a reasonable time. The
| entire challenge of balancing a single player game is to hide
| all the ways the game holds your hand, while making the player
| feel responsible for all the times you win."
| LZ_Khan wrote:
| Um.. elden ring?
| mwaitjmp wrote:
| Any soulsborne game for that matter. They are all a long
| enjoyable slog. Recommended for sure.
| azemetre wrote:
| Literally spent 50 hours mucking around exploring
| everything I could before realizing that you have to fight
| Margit to progress the story. I honestly thought it was a
| game like Shadow of the Colossus where you freely explore
| and just fight bosses.
|
| Fun game but some very terrible UX decisions that seem
| spiteful at times.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| You don't have to fight Margit, he is completely optional
| and so is the entirety of Stormveil and the boss there.
| ar_lan wrote:
| I did the same exact thing. In fact, the whole rest of
| lakes of Niurnia I had found far earlier than I found
| Margit because I accidentally found the shortcut and
| thought - well, he was blocking this path, so I guess
| he's not necessary.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| I didn't find the shortcut around Stormveil until my
| second character. After a while I realized that Margit-
| Stormveil-Godrick are all completely optional.
| wfleming wrote:
| From Soft games are, I think, popular with a particular
| niche precisely because they swim against the tide here.
|
| Even their games, though, although they are famously and
| genuinely difficult, do try and guide the player to
| success. They just do it in somewhat subtle ways by trying
| to kill you a lot. I've been watching a let's play series
| on YouTube of Dark Souls I & III for a while ("Souls
| Academy"), and one of things I enjoy about it is how they
| often talk about what skills particular bosses or game
| areas are trying to teach you, so that you can be
| successful with later, harder challenges.
|
| But you're completely right that these games aren't "hard
| not to finish". They're extremely hard to finish!
| ethbr0 wrote:
| And I'd argue they wouldn't be as successful as they are
| if they weren't a rejection of something players sense in
| most other games, even if they don't consciously notice
| the systems helping them.
|
| Kind of like the Matrix.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I thought Elden Ring was a bit weird in this regard.
| Margit is likely the first boss people fight. And he does
| introduce a lot of concepts that seem pertinent. He's
| classic souls boss with a few touches of the game's
| unique concepts. He hits very fast, sometimes without
| telegraphing. If you're competent at Margit then Godrey
| is likely to be mechanically simpler.
|
| But then for some reason every single other major boss is
| very gimmicky and does not draw upon this. Radahn is a
| (fun) clusterfuck with yer boys. Rennala just has
| projectiles and no defenses. Rykard is... just poorly
| designed and can't hit you if you're in melee range. Fire
| Giant is a gimmicky horse battle. Astel is sort of
| similar to Rennala. Hoarah does his own thing with grabs
| and jumpable stomps. Malekith and Malenia are so
| awkwardly fast that you need to be proactively
| positioning rather than reacting to their telegraphed
| moves for the most part.
|
| Then you've got at the endgame Morgot and Radagon who,
| for some reason, seem to be not only simpler, but
| significantly slower opponents than Margit.
|
| Not a complaint really. I thought boss design was great
| and entertaining. But definitely a bit unusual. Sekiro's
| boss progression was amazing and the best I've ever seen.
| It's a really great inflection point when Genichiro
| swings by to make sure you understand the game's not
| gonna fuck around anymore.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| I found the biggest challenge with Margit was that he
| telegraphs _too much_. Hell raise his weapon and then
| just hold it much longer than you think he will, you roll
| early and then he punishes you.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| In my opinion Elden Ring demonstrates how making a
| Soulsborne game more mainstream actually makes it less like
| a Soulsborne game.
|
| It's so player friendly and lacks most of the hard lessons
| previous titles teach.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| This is something I didn't like about the game. They
| always had multiplayer so difficulty has always been...
| optional in a way. But the summons in this game are
| extremely powerful, and they change the dynamics of the
| fight from slowly mastering an encounter to high variance
| gambles on being able to capitalize on the boss just not
| looking at you. Which is fine. You can just not use
| summons. But then you see something like the godskin duo
| with a premade npc ally outside to be summoned and you
| start to get conflicting feelings about what's
| appropriate "intended" difficulty.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > very hard to lose
|
| Sort of. You could argue that Super Mario Bros. is 99.9% losing
| for most people. But within those losses are little personal
| victories, like getting past the first Goomba.
|
| I hate games that try to remove _all_ loss, assuming people can
| 't handle it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, I was never really a serious gamer and, for the most
| part, I didn't really win--as in get all the way through--
| most games I played over time. I don't think it's that I
| couldn't but just wasn't interested enough to put in the
| time.
| Ninjinka wrote:
| Whew got it with 2 options left...50/50.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| I found this challenging but won on my first attempt without any
| undos.
|
| Spoiler for today's word: https://imgur.com/a/kNvhK0q
| bena wrote:
| I chose "GREAT", hit that "A", then blanked on any word that
| didn't have GRET in it at all but had an A in the fourth
| position.
|
| I then looked up the word list and used the first word that fit
| the conditions. And that was the word.
| kevinpet wrote:
| I think the key here is repeated letters. Queue, etc.
| xipho wrote:
| My uncle, a Scrabble nut, proposed this exact derivative game to
| me well over a month ago, it's amazing to see ideas emerge in
| parallel. Feels like "if you've thought of it someone else has
| already" is more of a Law then a quip at this point.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I guess you could say the question isn't whether your idea is
| _unique_ , but whether you've put in the time and effort to
| develop it, and whether your execution is good.
| julianwachholz wrote:
| Hard agree. 15 minutes after my very first tweet about my
| variant, somebody else announced theirs with the exact same
| concept! I mean what are the odds?
| Minor49er wrote:
| I got down to one of two possible words and managed to guess the
| right one. I like this twist on the original
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| My minor nitpick would be to show the hint / toast every time
| Enter is pressed, not just the first time.
| dontwordle wrote:
| Thank you! This is on my list of defects
| gjm11 wrote:
| Closely related (meaning: I think it might be _exactly_ the same
| game): Antiwordle, https://www.antiwordle.com/ .
|
| [EDITED to add:] Not exactly the same; with Antiwordle the idea
| is just to last as long as you can, rather than having a limit of
| 6, and it doesn't have undos. Also, UX-wise, I don't think
| Antiwordle tells you how many possibilities remain (win for Don't
| Wordle), and it doesn't have such slow tile-flipping animations
| (win for Antiwordle).
| peeters wrote:
| Really fun! My strategy was to try to figure out the word, undo
| back to the beginning, then construct a backwards chain. Much
| easier to work backwards because you can be a lot less efficient
| about it.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| It's amazing to experience how this one design change completely
| ruins the game experience for me. And I really mean that: Totally
| unexpected before I actually gave it a go. Fascinating.
| dontwordle wrote:
| Hello! I am the creator of Don't Wordle. Really excited to see
| this took off today.
|
| I thought I would share some background about the game, some of
| the iterations I went through, and some of the future features I
| would like to add.
|
| Background: Like many others, I have been playing Wordle daily.
| Recently, my Wordle win streak hit 99. I was admittedly very
| careful with my guesses on Day 100, not wanting to ruin my
| streak. Then I began to wonder...even if I wanted to lose
| intentionally, could I do it? Obviously, I could make
| intentionally bad guesses, but that would take the fun out of it.
| So I decided to build Don't Wordle.
|
| Iterations I have gone through:
|
| The first version of the game was simpler and much worse IMO. I
| did not display the "Valid Words Remaining" at the top, and there
| was no concept of "Undos". Initially, I actually displayed the
| Wordle word at the top throughout the entire game! To be honest,
| that doesn't change the difficulty of the game that much.
| However, given that the spirit of the game is not to guess the
| Wordle word, it seemed like the right decision to hide it.
|
| I created the "Valid Words Remaining" feature when I realized how
| challenging the game was. I kept getting stuck and wondering
| whether there were even any words left besides to Wordle word.
| When I saw how fast the count shrinks, I felt the game was a lot
| more interesting.
|
| I then added the concept of "Undos" when I realized the game was
| still too challenging. It's particulary lame if you're playing
| the game for the first time and you get eliminated after just 1
| or 2 guesses.
|
| Current Tech Stack:
|
| -Route53 + Cloudfront + S3 + Create React App
|
| Unexpected challenges:
|
| 1. The animations. I obviously copied all the concepts from the
| original Wordle, but I failed to appreciate the complexity.
|
| 2. The nuances of the repeat letter words.
|
| 3. What makes a Wordle square yellow? The answer is not so simple
|
| 4. Trying to get www.dontwordle.com and dontwordle.com to take
| you to the same URL (either www.dontwordle.com or dontwordle.com)
| and still support TLS and only use the tech I mentioned above. I
| actually still don't have it working perfectly. I know of a
| solution, but it's overly complicated
|
| Features I would like to still add:
|
| 1. I have heard from multiple people that it's annoying how you
| could get the game in an unwinnable state without realizing it.
| For example, maybe 20 valid words remain, but there is no valid
| sequence of words remaining to finish the puzzle. While the
| "Valid Words Remaining" feature is nice, it would also be cool to
| have a "Valid Solutions Remaining" feature
|
| 2. I would like to build a brute force solver that you can watch
| attempt to play the game in real-time. I have built something
| similar for a crossword puzzle and really enjoyed watching the
| computer try to fill the grid. I think it would be cool to do
| that same thing with this game.
|
| Question I don't yet know the answer to:
|
| Do any words exist that would not have a single valid solution in
| this game?
| cactus2093 wrote:
| This is really cool! I've wondered about exactly this same
| thing. Showing the valid solutions remaining would be really
| neat as well, because I'm really not sure how to interpret
| valid words remaining or when to use my undos in the current
| implementation. (If it's too computationally intensive, I would
| think you could memoize it across all users' games and that
| should make it feasible).
|
| One other suggestion, is maybe the win condition shouldn't be
| exactly the same as in wordle. Instead of only allowing one
| game per day but using undos to make it easier, maybe allow 5
| attempts per day instead? As a player I think it's simpler to
| be able to retry from the beginning if I lose rather than try
| to figure out the optimal time to use my undo.
| soxocx wrote:
| > 4. Trying to get www.dontwordle.com and dontwordle.com to
| take you to the same URL (either www.dontwordle.com or
| dontwordle.com) and still support TLS and only use the tech I
| mentioned above. I actually still don't have it working
| perfectly. I know of a solution, but it's overly complicated
|
| If you use Cloudfront with an S3 bucket as origin for
| _dontwordle.com_, just create a second Cloudfront with an S3
| Bucket for _www.dontwordle.com_ and enable "static website
| hosting" to redirect to "dontwordle.com" on the second bucket.
| dontwordle wrote:
| So you can do this, but it won't support TLS to my knowledge.
| At least in my testing, it will work to navigate to
| www.dontwordle.com (you will get redirected to
| https://dontwordle.com). However, if you tried navigating
| _directly_ to https://www.dontwordle.com, that would not
| work. In fact, you can try clicking on
| https://www.dontwordle.com right now, and it won't work :) To
| be fair, currently I do not have it implemented exactly the
| way you described, but I encountered this exact same behavior
| when I tried it that way
| soxocx wrote:
| I use the setup described.
|
| It was some tinkering around with bucket name (has to match
| the subdomain.domain.tld) and the cloudfront origin
| settings. But it works flawlessly. Feel free to ping me if
| you need details.
|
| See links below.
|
| coindex.de www.coindex.de
| aidos wrote:
| Yup, been there. Have a look to see if cloudflare will do
| what you need within the free plan. You just point it at
| the bucket, add a rule for the redirect and all the tls is
| handled for you. It's pretty painless. Feel free to ping me
| if you want to run through the steps.
| ghaff wrote:
| >What makes a Wordle square yellow
|
| One thing I had wondered--but not enough to figure out what the
| code does...
|
| Let's say you enter Mamma for example. And there is one M in
| the word but in the second position. Which M square does Wordle
| choose to turn yellow? (But maybe it doesn't matter?) There may
| be other cases like that as well.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| > Let's say you enter Mamma for example. And there is one M
| in the word but in the second position. Which M square does
| Wordle choose to turn yellow? (But maybe it doesn't matter?)
|
| I don't think it matters, it should just default to the first
| M.
| jzimbel wrote:
| Here's the algorithm of the game's letter marking system,
| based on my experience reproducing its logic for a script I
| wrote that computes remaining words from your guesses and
| their corresponding marks.
|
| Suppose the target word is "polar" and you guess "banal".
|
| A submitted word is marked in 3 passes.
|
| 0. Initial state: ("banal", "polar")
|
| 1. Zip together the letters of the guess and target words,
| and loop through the zipped list. When both letters at a
| position are the same, replace the guess letter with the
| symbol for "correct" (green) and remove the target letter
| from the target word. State: ("banGl", "polr")
|
| 2. Loop through the target word's letters, replacing the
| first occurrence (if any) of each one in the guess word with
| the symbol for "present" (yellow). State: ("banGY", "polr")
|
| 3. Replace any remaining letters in the guess word with the
| symbol for "not present" (black). State: ("BBBGY", "polr")
|
| Return the marked guess word.
|
| ---
|
| Other examples:
|
| 0. ("mamma", "amaze")
|
| 1. ("mamma", "amaze")
|
| 2. ("YYmmY", "amaze")
|
| 3. ("YYBBY", "amaze")
|
| ---
|
| 0. ("nieto", "otono")
|
| 1. ("nietG", "oton")
|
| 2. ("nieYG", "oton")
|
| 3. ("BBBYG", "oton")
|
| _edit_ : fixing formatting issues. Sorry, first time posting
| a comment on here.
| julianwachholz wrote:
| For yellow squares, the particular order in which they turn
| yellow doesn't matter.
|
| The remaining grey Ms tell you the same thing (that those
| positions don't have an M).
| gweinberg wrote:
| That's true for Wordle, but I think according to the
| dontwordle rules you are allowed to make a guess with an em
| on one of the grey squares anyway.
| db_admin wrote:
| No you are not allowed to do that. A grey square excludes
| the letter from the position, regardless of any yellow
| squares.
| pricci wrote:
| You are correct. Words with repeated letters are not a
| good strategy in this game.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Words with repeated letters are a _great_ strategy, as
| long as you know or strongly suspect the letter isn 't in
| the target word, and the letter is rare so eliminating it
| doesn't eliminate much.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| I'm not sure about your conclusion here. If we don't
| repeat the letter then we're going to have information
| about another letter, which we don't want.
| moron4hire wrote:
| From experience, the first M.
| drooglyman wrote:
| Yep, it's the first M.
|
| I think in general the rule is this: - Any Ms in the
| correct position turn green (duh) - If there are X Ms
| remaining in the answer, turn the first X (non-green) Ms in
| the guess yellow
| soperj wrote:
| for #4 does setting the a record for the naked domain to
| 174.129.25.170 not support tls?
| InfoSecErik wrote:
| I love the twist on the game, as well as the implementation
| automagically calling out when I've been defeated. Well done!
| abofh wrote:
| For #4, this is actually frustratingly difficult, but if your
| constraints are not adding to the complexity, your best bet is
| to not, and just set your cookies to the domain. But if you
| like, one approach that would work: - Cert with SAN - CNAME's
| on the CF distribution - S3 Bucket And the sneaky bit: Use a
| cloudfront lambda to redirect "wrong" Hosts - comes with a
| cost, but it's super marginal.
|
| Otherwise, your best approach is sadly a second cloudfront
| distribution with a different bucket (or bucket path) that just
| hosts a redirecting index key because you end up fighting
| stupid AWS design decisions.
|
| Not that I've ever wasted stupid amounts of time on this
| particular problem...
| aidos wrote:
| These days my solution is to put cloudflare in front of it
| and walk away.
|
| Good game to add to my current daily routine (heardle,
| Wordle, quordle, worldle), but man is it hard!
| 867-5309 wrote:
| surely the answer is just an HTTP redirect?
|
| thanks for heardle! have you tried nerdle?
| aidos wrote:
| If you're statically hosting on s3 then that isn't an
| option while also supporting tls. You need something in
| front. You can go the cloudfront route but last time I
| looked it was all a bit of a pain. Cloudflare takes
| minutes to set up and the whole thing will be done and
| maintenance free.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| thanks for the info. I use letsencrypt and have never had
| to touch it since setup, cloudflare must work in a
| similar way but handling DNS aswell
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| I love the premise! It really pokes fun at how Wordle (and
| other popular games) are actually pretty hard to lose if you
| play anywhere above some very low threshold of effort/ability.
|
| > it would also be cool to have a "Valid Solutions Remaining"
| feature
|
| That would be awesome. I suppose the biggest challenge would be
| to enumerate possible solutions in tree form to allow DFS or
| BFS searching.
|
| Thanks for sharing!
| FatalLogic wrote:
| Great game. Doesn't it push players towards a strategy of
| working out the solution 'offline', though?
|
| I mean, you start by playing almost the same as standard
| Wordle, just to guess the answer, without entering it. Then
| undo everything. Next, figure out a solution which avoids that
| word. Finally, type in your entire solution.
|
| This could be a bit grindy, and not in the spirit of the game,
| but it seems like almost assured to win, or am I wrong?
|
| Edit: If there are fewer undos allowed, this strategy gets more
| difficult
| dontwordle wrote:
| I agree with your take. It's definitely a problem with the
| current game format. I have thought through some different
| alternatives, but not a fan of any of them up to this point.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Seems like the best strategy is to choose words with repeat
| letters. For example, two great first choices would be LOLLY and
| SASSY. That's two empty cells that can't be used to guess.
| dandanua wrote:
| Another strategy is to use rarer letters, like in FUZZY.
| maffydub wrote:
| ...unless any of those letters appear in the answer - then
| you're locked into including them in subsequent guesses!
|
| Even worse if your guess had them in the right location!
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, yes, but you're playing the odds. Sure, make the wrong
| choice and you can lose fast but I'm guessing, statistically,
| repeated less common letters is the best overall approach
| over time.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I think no. This one's actually got a lot of depth to it. SASSY
| and LOLLY use up Y which is critical to forming 5 letter words.
| S is pretty good too. Preserving your vowels seems to be an
| important concept. You want to minimize the usage of them. But
| if you get a single yellow value you can dance around it
| safely. Or if you get a single green of it and no blacks, you
| can go for a word using two of that vowel which hopefully
| doesn't prove to be correct.
|
| WHIZZ seems like it could be a very strong opening move.
|
| VEXED looks pretty promising too.
| rkimb wrote:
| You can't guess Y twice...
| pgreenwood wrote:
| SHYLY SLYLY
| jolmg wrote:
| > first choices
| Morizero wrote:
| MAMMA is my go-to
| uxamanda wrote:
| After using WordleBot [0] for a few days, it became clear that my
| last "random" guess was often the only choice left, so from this
| sense, this anti-wordle seems impossibly hard.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-
| bot.h...
| ghaff wrote:
| One of the reasons I suspect that Wordle is popular is that
| it's "calibrated" (word length, number of guesses, don't have
| to play on hard mode) to almost always be winnable if you have
| some semblance of a decent English vocabulary and some sense
| for letter combinations.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > One of the reasons I suspect that Wordle is popular is that
| it's "calibrated" (word length, number of guesses, don't have
| to play on hard mode) to almost always be winnable if you
| have some semblance of a decent English vocabulary and some
| sense for letter combinations.
|
| Seems like the perfect popular game: be easy enough for most
| everyone to get, but just hard enough to give a feeling of
| mastery.
|
| I had a similar feeling when playing Guitar Hero way back. It
| was pretty easy to get the hang of at a medium level, but it
| was just hard enough that it felt like an accomplishment.
| Plus the "output" you got from playing the game well (a
| complex, professionally played song) was wildly
| disproportionate to to your inputs (a bit of well-timed
| button mashing that had a far simpler in structure). The
| mistakes screwing up the song sealed the illusion of skill.
| golergka wrote:
| Easy to learn, impossible to master is actually one of the
| classic tenets of game design. I'm genuinely curious, did
| you hear this or variant somewhere before, or did you come
| up with this on your own?
| noirbot wrote:
| And the real value of it is that within "success" there's
| ranges. The real victory for me is if I can get Wordle in
| less than 4 guesses, since that's about how fast one can do
| it with optimal play. I don't really usually have a risk of
| "losing", but for me it's a bummer if I get to guess 5 or
| 6.
|
| Not everything has to be pass/fail, and most things in life
| aren't.
| [deleted]
| pontus wrote:
| It's a fun idea, but I found it super frustrating because it gets
| harder and harder to come up with consistent words.
|
| I'd personally like an "easy setting" where there's another key
| color that indicates if a letter is viable. So when there are
| only say 10 possible words left it'd highlight the letter the
| word could start with. Maybe it's just me though.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Similar to https://lazyguyy.github.io/survivle/
|
| I like this one better, the undo button is a nice touch.
| [deleted]
| indecisive_user wrote:
| Here's my attempt to maximize the amount of remaining words. I
| ended with 7 still remaining.
|
| It was tough to come up with any sequence that didn't have a
| 50/50 chance of losing on the last guess.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/2qZgr15.png
| alliao wrote:
| my lack of progress frustrates :P
| necovek wrote:
| I figured I want to try words with fewest unique letters so after
| a couple of my own guesses, Kagi search brought me to
| https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/37762/five-lett...
| -- I guess going through these hoping for misses should work well
| as a strategy.
|
| I still failed as I came to a 50-50% chance at the end (I was
| choosing between "f" and "v" to start the word, got the rest of
| them right).
| necovek wrote:
| Or maybe not, most of them seem not to be valid choices in
| DontWordle.
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