daluan

If you guys have any questions, comments, or feedback, I would be more than open to hearing them, and I'll respond promptly. Feel free to be as harsh as you want!

Some models here are called by their IDs that date them on Amazon Bedrock, for example, the Haiku 4.5 ID is 20251001. Other models sometimes go through a provider's live endpoint, and those can change behind the same name. So drift is possible for some models and unlikely for others. A daily reset would be too noisy and costly (I'm still in school lol). Most models play only a handful of games a day, and Codenames has a lot of board luck through RNG. Potentially, maybe a weekly recalibration is an interesting research idea though.

Thank you, cheekygeeky, for your numerous interesting questions. I'll try to ponder them to improve my site. If you're interested in testing the models for yourself, you can click on the link in my title or visit wordspies.com to get a feel for how different models perform when you play with and against them!

Yup, good question, and let me clear up some confusion. The model leaderboard has no starting score; every model starts out equal, and all the ratings are calculated together from the full set of results. For example, if a new model gets released, like Gpt 6.1 Terra, we have it play against models like Sonnet 5.5, which we have a lot of data on, to scale its performance against it. (It did a lot better than Sonnet, in case you're curious).

Yup, that's a fair question. It's not exactly running Elo. It's more of a Bradley-Terry fit across all games at once, mapped to the Elo scale (400 points = 10:1 odds). Game order doesn't change it. I also have each board played twice with both sides swapped to ensure fairness, so, for example, if one game has Kimi with 9 red words and Claude with 8 blue words, I make new agents of those same models where Claude now has those same 9 red words from Kimi and Kimi now has those 8 blue words from Claude.

I may add a "how ratings work" section on my site if more folks express interest.

Hi guys,

I'm a college student, and I enjoy playing word games like Codenames, but it can be hard sometimes to find enough people to play when everyone is available, so I made an app that allows you to fill any seat with an AI teammate and also play against AI. This way it allows for people to get the full strategic experience of codenames just on their own.

I was also able to measure and benchmark a few different LLMs through API calls and give them ELO ratings based on stuff like win rate and clue/guess accuracy. If anyone is interested, they can see more on the methodology of how I benchmark these models over here:wordspies.com/arena. I think it's pretty interesting because it gives you a lot of insight into the NLP capabilities of these various LLMs.

A few interesting stats were that I rated Gemini 4 Argon at 1775, GPT-6.1 Sol at 1744, GPT-6 Astra at 1723, Claude Fable 5.1 at 1623, and Claude Opus 5.5 at 1592. There are quite a few interesting things you'll find from there, like how, although newer and more expensive models tend to perform better, there are some rare exceptions, like Kimi K2.5 slightly edging out Kimi K3.

Check the site out if you're interested in NLP and data science and would like to see what level of frontier LLMs you can successfully win against!

Daniel

From my experience with finetuning Gemma 12B, I noticed that 4-bit quantization would hurt instruction-following especially when it comes to NLP.

I have LLMs as players in a hidden-information word game. Models would often leak hidden info in their reasoning, so you had to filter what each side sees. Sometimes you have to be aware that these LLMs can be sneaky at times.