Messages

Looking gorgeous. It's clear that Ben has really upped his game on character art/animation. And I really like that you are exploring different (story) genres in the same universe. I have hopes for the temporal puzzles!

[4.06]

An even four. Nice!

Easy mode is necessarily easier because it gives you a way out of those "what's the fifth letter?" cases (e.g. "S_OUT") and has no drawbacks. You can still use the letters you know whenever you like, you just don't have to.

Wordle 287 3/6
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No. guesses	No. of times	Points
1	0	0
2	2	4
3	22	66
4	36	144
5	15	75
6	8	48
	Total	337
	/83 days	4.06

That's why I think hard mode is so pointless. What's the game in just guessing which of X possibilities it happens to be?

Wordle 285 3/6
Wordle 286 3/6
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Got lucky on the first guess, saw that there were at least five possibilities remaining and decided to use my second to find out which rather than take a random shot.

Just six more of those to get my average down to 4!

5/6 (282)

Spoiler

FOUND. One of those damn ones that depend very largely on luck, since the first letter has 8 possibilities with everything else in place. If you get the F early you're set, otherwise you'll have to hunt for it. I could find no way to get even three of F, H, W, B into a five-letter word, but apparently Wordle accepts "whoof."

[close]

I've been 4/6 every time since my last update, including today (281).

Spoiler

EPOXY was an interesting one. (I must admit I first thought it was a brand name/proper noun and thus not a valid word under Scrabble rules.) After three guesses I only had the O green and the E yellow, with E_O__ and __OE_ as possible formats, but having eliminated most common letters, there couldn't be that many possibilities. I came up with "epoxy" pretty quickly, but then spent a good deal of time assuring myself that I wasn't missing some other, better possibility.

[close]

Stupot, I don't think one 5/6 undoes two 2/6s in a row. Indeed, on an over/under relative to 4, you're still 3 under par!

milkanannan, the good thing about vowels is that there's got to be at least one, and if you've eliminated the most common ones that means the possible options are few. I like the starting word SERAI to knock out the top three. (Though I try to play different starting words for variety; today I started with INERT.) If that's a miss, you can pretty easily fit two out of O,U,Y in a second guessââ,¬â€or all three if you don't want to take a chance, e.g. YOUNG.

Wordle 278 3/6
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[4.11]

You're doing a bit better than me, Stu:

No. guesses	No. of times	Points
1	0	0
2	2	4
3	18	54
4	31	124
5	14	70
6	8	48
	Total	300
	/73 days	4.11

I’d like it to be below 4.

That's my goal too.

Before the New York Times bought it, I was averaging closer to 3, suggesting maybe it has got harder since the buyout (although I hadn’t been playing it for long).

Well, all the solutions for the next 8 years or so are hardcoded into the game, and the only change NYT made was to remove a handful of words that were either potentially offensive ("slave", "pussy") or presumably considered too obscure ("agora", "pupal"). (Personally, while I understand why they've removed them as solutions, I think they should still be valid guesses.)

So any change in difficulty is almost certainly imagined or coincidental, unless Wardle designed a rising difficulty curve into the game originally.

277 took me 4. I made a mistake in my analysis that cost me one turn.

Today's (276) took me 6. I don't really think I made any serious mistakesâ€"I could have got it in 5, but that would have meant a risk of not getting it at all.

Spoiler

After guess 3, I had S_O_L or SLO__, and with the remaining letters it was down to SPOIL, SPOOL, SLOOP, SLOPS, SLOGS, SLOBS, SLOSH. I played 4: SPOIL, 5: SLOGS (because SLOSH, although IMO a more likely answer, would have left me to guess between SLOGS/SLOBS if wrong), 6: SLOSH.

[close]

Got it in 2 for Wordle 275 today, and I'm quite happy about the process to get there, as it wasn't just a lucky guess but a fairly careful line of reasoning. (From 1 green and 2 yellow on first guess.)

[Murdle]

There is already a Wordle-clone called Murdle, but I still think that's a good name for a cash-in movie about a serial killer who sends taunting clues to the police and challenges the detectives to catch him by his sixth victim.

Today I got the word on second try

Congrats! I got it in 4. Though I actually think it shouldn't be a valid wordââ,¬Â¦

Spoiler

since sauté is spelled with an accent that Wordle doesn't have.

[close]

Oh, I do that anyway, I thought it was the best strategy to get answers in the minimum time.

It's the best (in fact, only) way to get it on the current guess, but it's usually the worst way to get in on the next guess (or the one afterââ,¬Â¦), because you're not maximizing the amount of information you get from the guess if it doesn't turn out to be the right word. Maybe the clearest example is when you have four green, lacking one letter, like with WATCH the other day when people missed it because they kept trying BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH, PATCHââ,¬Â¦ while e.g. CLAMP would eliminate four possibilities in one guess.

If you're trying to minimize your average number of guesses over many rounds of play (not the only way to play the game, for sure, but a reasonable metric for performance), you should only really try to guess the word once you are relatively confident (ideally 50%), or if the guess gives you a lot more information (you have a lot of yellow letters and you're not sure of where they go). The rest of the time you should (1) be searching for missing letters, (2) find the right position for the yellow letters (usually less important, but it depends on what they are and how many yellow and green you have).

Using this strategy and a good starting word (pair of words, rather), you have a very good chance to get it on the third or fourth guess, and you're almost guaranteed not to fail. You sacrifice the chance of getting it on the second guess except by extremely good luck (I've only got it once; LAPSE, where my first guess was LANES), but unless you're very lucky with your first word that's a low probability anyway.

I personally find hard mode/the "stick with what I know" approach not very interesting, since it reduces the game to almost pure guessing with very little strategy.

There's a version called Absurdle that always gives you the "maximally unlucky" result of any guess. If you read the description of how it works, that should give you a good idea of the "optimal" way to play Wordle.

   If only I had unknown utterances
   and extraordinary verses,
   in a new language that does not pass away,
   free from repetition,
   without a verse of worn-out speech
   spoken by the ancestors!
   I shall wring my body for what is in it,
   â€" a release of all my speech.
   For what is already said can only be repeated;
   what is said once has been said;
   this is no vain boast of the ancients' speech
   that those who are later should find it good.

      â€"Khakheperraseneb the scribe, c. 1900 BCE

Cool, congratulations! I just saw the glowing review over on the A.V. Club. Always great to see somebody doing something a little different, especially at this level of polish.

Spring Breakers?

It's a really interesting scene to me, because it shows just how much a small change can affect everything in an adaptation.

The book goes to considerable effort to motivate why Duke Leto doesn't turn on his shield at this momentâ€"it may even be the original reason for the idea that shields and lasguns cause nuclear-like "explosive pyrotechnics" if they interact.

The movie, on the other hand, makes no reference to this phenomenon or danger, and instead simply introduces the concept of missiles with drills that can penetrate shields. Which means it can allow Leto to turn on his shield in this scene, as seen in the screencap. The fallout of this adaptation choice is that shields are relatively nerfed in the movie version, with significant implications for how all the battle and combat scenes are staged, the design of armor, etc.

Yes it is.

I actually couldn't finish this movie because I got so frustrated with the main character.

Nope.

Nay.

Maybe we haven't had this one yet: