Nearly Cheating | Hacker News Reader

Nearly Cheating

leancrew.com

46 pointssurprisetalk35 comments

I would find it largely unsatisfying to "solve" the Wordle in one guess by simply using the same word every day until it inevitably came up. When I play, I always pick a random word to start without really considering whether that word has already been a solution. It happened once that I guessed the correct word on the first try and it felt pretty incredible as the chances of this are so low.

We always start with a different word too. Randomizes the difficulty a bit more.

How is your approach different? The chances of the original approach are also low, and it similarly replaces a game of skill with a game of pure luck

The chance that he will "win" in one guess in the future is 100%. Not so when you choose random words.

I mean, the difference between these two is a mathematical technicality. For all practical purposes it’s the same thing.

The chances that he wins on any given day are the same, but not that he will win within x days. Right?

Not really.

There are legal (good) unusual starting words that it’s a good bet are not in the set of Wordle answers.

It’s human psychology. Imagine you guess the birthday of everyone you meet. Your odds of being right are the same no matter whether you always say “January 1” or if you pick a date that feels right for the person (assuming there is no astrological or other magical sensing).

But getting Jan 1 right would feel like an inevitable event, like you’re testing statistics and, yep, they work. Getting a custom date right would feel like you made a smart choice. Even if you know it’s just the same statistics.

At least I expect most people would feel that, or at least as many as enjoy gambling in games of chance.

I have the strongest urge to be pedantic and point out that birthdates are not normally distributed. But I get your point.

They are indeed not normally distributed, but did you mean that they are not uniformly distributed?

That's what happens when you give into the pedantry gremlin. He comes for you too.

Uno reverse card right there.

The best part about any game is when you can discard the rules and play the game the way you want.

I still play cribbage according to the rules, but like to do things like set my opponent's back peg to the rear by a few points, and count my hand in bizarre ways that still yield the proper results.

There is playing the game, and there is playing the playing.

I enjoy coming up with alternate terminology. It’s not a pair, it’s a double run minus the singletons.

I'll count a double run as "three and three make six plus two make eight" and then shorten it to "sixty-two makes eight".

I have friends who play Wordle in hard mode because it's called hard mode, but I don't because it's a much less interesting game. The strategic decision of whether to try for the answer or use a 'throwaway' word to gain more information adds a lot to the game.

Ha, agreed. It's interesting that the first article I clicked about hard mode seems to suggest that it makes the game easier and (at the risk of being snotty) shows that the author REALLY DOESN'T get information theory.

The difficulty is different - in hard mode you can trap yourself such that whether you guess the answer is pure luck. The average number of guesses to solve is (trivially) higher because you've constrained the "guess space" more.

But as you point out, having more choice is a different kind of difficulty. The game's creator called it hard because it will take you more guesses, not because each guess is harder

> not because each guess is harder

Not sure about that. It's definitely harder to always have to come up with a word that fits the constraints. It's how I thought you were supposed to play until I realized you can guess a random word every time just to see if the target word has those letters which makes the game trivial.

It depends on where the difficulty comes from (for you!)

That's my whole point. My understanding from watching jorbs is that the highest skill aspect of slay the spire is correctly navigating shops because you have the most choices.

So in the sense that "if I pick a random valid guess" you are more likely to come upon a good guess in hard mode, non-hard-mode is harder. However, in the sense that "you, a human, have to think of a word that matches the constraints and not just any five letter thing" hard mode is harder

It also depends on your objective. I play in nominally easy mode but if I get a certain threshold of information on my first guess I’ll go for a possible answer. Whereas if you use three words to eliminate the most letters you’ll probably never solve in less than 4 or 5.

I don't tell anyone I play wordle, because my version of fun is using (rip)grep against /usr/share/dict/words to practice my regexp skills. "Ruins" the game, but in the process, creates a new one.

I'll share a Wordle "solver" I recently created on Glitch: https://ps-wordle-solver.glitch.me/

You tell it which letters it can't be, are somewhere, and are exactly where. It shows letter frequency, possible words, and words that use high frequency characters. I don't think I actually solve Wordle's in fewer guesses on average when using it, but it is expanding what words I'll consider. I consider it more of a training tool than a cheat tool since it is more fun to play without it.

I used to use Word Hippo quite a bit. These days only if I’m pretty stuck and just don’t want to fill a sheet of paper with manual permutations.

Could have been done in one command. `grep 'alter\|dwelt' answers.txt`.

Oh ! In fact, it's not the latest post and "Leon Cowle" already mentioned it. The last post about mastodon and Conlextions is, from my point of view, more interesting.

If you like Wordle, I recommend the iOS game “word/off”. You play against a friend, making up your own challenge words for each other. I find this much more interesting and fun. The game is free and has no ads.

Got a link? Frustratingly the App Store search didn’t surface anything, but neither did Kagi.

Perhaps: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/word-off/id1610878606

Yes! That's it: "word/off" by Mandala Wellness.

> I recognize that some of you will read this and think I’ve crossed the line of Wordle ethics into outright cheating. You can keep your opinions to yourself.

I will not. You sir are evil and you will rot in literary hell.

I kid of course. This seemed like a fun way to spend some alone time with your server.

We have shared the feeling of getting the worlde word on the first try and it is a nice one. We have been playing DREAM for more than a year, until we finally achieved it (the dream of getting the word on the first try that is).

> The Times hasn’t screwed up the game the way I thought it would

I don't know... they've changed word list multiple times breaking my TUI version of Wordle.

Does anyone use all previous result and dictionary to reverse logic what word will be choose to guess next round ?

What advantage does clever shell hacking have over a simple python script?

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