7 ms·
Guess the daily Wordle in one try using the tweet distribution
- not2b 5y agoYou can guess it in one try by carefully reading the code. There is no server that knows the correct answer. The client already knows, based on the date. That is why you can only play once per day.
- zamadatix 5y agoAs already explained by carefully reading the opening of the post.
- ska 5y agoThat's not really guessing though, is it?
- guipsp 5y agoYes, but there's no fun in that
- echeese 5y agoWhere's the challenge in that?
- gojomo 5y agoThanks, Captain Kirk. You get a commendation for knowing how to 'View Source'.
- mtoner23 5y agoAmazing, what a brilliant idea
- freeslave 5y agoCool but don't read all the way if you haven't done today's Wordle!
- benhamner 5y agoSorry about that! Just updated so today's guess is hidden by default (and you can click-to-unveil)
- swatts999 5y agoThis is super smart. I wonder how many tweets this approach needs each day to converge to the correct answer? It would be interesting to see some plots vs. num tweets
- beepbooptheory 5y agoThis is brilliant and something I had the intuition was possible, just couldn't put it all together myself. What was missing, I think, in my thought process was just taking into account the general common occurrence of words in English in general. Plus how to deal with static. Just so cool someone put this together, major props.
- siruva07 5y agoThis is the HN I’m here for. Brilliant.
- jsmith99 5y agoIf you know someone always starts with SLATE it makes it easier...
- jedberg 5y agoI start with salet. Same letters but more likely to be in the right place.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoWhat is Wordle?
- jonny_eh 5y agoThis is your regular reminder that today's word, and all the upcoming ones, are located in the Wordle minified JS.
- lkbm 5y agoYes, we know. We can also easily "solve" a crossword puzzle by waiting a day and just copying down the published answers. People are having fun solving puzzles in clever ways. This post is an exceptionally clever way of solving a puzzle in an unexpected way, using forensic data analysis, which is itself something of interest to a lot of us.
- databased 5y agoYep, you can try https://wordhoot.com https://wordhoot.com if knowing the answers are accessible somehow decreases your enjoyment of the game.
- thechriswalker 5y agoShameless plug, but I built a site to do this the other way around. Enter a 5 letter word and it'll tell you the next the it will be the wordle solution. https://atom.7r.pm/whendl/ https://atom.7r.pm/whendl/
- yen223 5y ago
- alisonkisk 5y ago
- jcpham2 5y agoCan someone TL:dr what this Wordless thing is?
- drdeca 5y agoMy understanding (I've never played it) is: each day there is a 5 letter word. You have a limited number of guesses as to what word it is (iirc 6 guesses). When you make a guess, it marks each letter with something indicating whether the actual word had that letter in that position, whether that word has a copy of that letter (and not one you already found), or whether that letter does not appear in that word. All of your guesses have to be words. In hard mode, all of your guesses have to contain all of the letters which you got right in a previous guess. At the end (if you get the word within 6 guesses?) you are given an option to share (on twitter mostly, I think) a representation of your game, in a way that doesn't reveal what words you guessed or what the final word was, just which positions had which of the 3 markings, which, in this share feature, are represented using emoji with the colored square blocks. This results in many people posting grids of colored square blocks, followed some fraction out of 6.
- dalmo3 5y agoTL;DR of the TL;DR: https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ Seriously, the quickest way to understand it is to just play the thing.
- ouid 5y agoNow someone make an adversarial twitter bot.
- smaudet 5y agoI mean, I guess - or you can just use a private tab. Same difference, except way less complex.
- toolslite 5y ago[dead]
- csours 5y agoMy metagame is guessing my friend's guesses.
- tedd4u 5y agoGlad to hear I am not the only one squandering my time doing this :) Might be a fun program to write. I find it’s often hard to guess more than the line prior to the win.
- aidenn0 5y agoI always lead with STOAE so people don't have issues guessing my first one at least. I also tend to follow with UNLID if STOAE has zero or one hits.
- csours 5y agoARTSY MODEL CHUNK here. It's not optimal, but it is pleasing to me in an aesthetic sense.
- balls187 5y agoI vary up my starting words to keep things interesting. Common ones for me are: MEATY, BISON, CHUMP, GROUP From yesterday's post on the state of the art, I tried SALET, but still took me 4 tries to get today's wordle.
- gs17 5y agoI turned on hard mode, and it's really forced me to change how I play. You can only really have one "starting word" unless you match zero letters.
- function_seven 5y agoAfter seeing an asterisk in one of my friends' shares, I'm now forced to play on hard mode as well. I can't risk the peer-shame of skating on easy mode anymore :) So that being said, I'm bracing myself for the curses-of-early-success this will lead me on. Right now I sometimes toss out a completely different word just to cover the search space. It has led me to quickly narrow down options. Am I screwed if my first guess matches on 2 letters? (Say, "___ES"). I guess that's why it's called "Hard Mode" to begin with.
- srcreigh 5y agoMy favourite part of this is accounting for some fake grids. Kudos! I have been so curious lately as to whether this was possible. EDIT: The next question is which (if any) of these signals can be removed and still get it in 1 guess. Or if there are any other signals. Or how many tweets are needed (is 50 enough? 10? or 1000? 10k?)
- not2b 5y agoAs the article explains, a grid containing, say, GGYGG, is fake. Finding more complex fakery is more difficult. (Edit: drat, HN filters out the Unicode colored-block characters).
- benhamner 5y agoThis uses ~2-3k tweets per day for most days, which seems to be more than enough. According to https://twitter.com/WordleStats/status/1486021209015963649 https://twitter.com/WordleStats/status/1486021209015963649 there's about 250k daily tweets per Wordle right now, so this is about a 1% sample coming from whatever the Twitter search API returned when I ran that query. The simulated distributions it's comparing to are based on 1000 runs per 5-letter word. Anecdotally, 250 was enough to get it working for those simulated distributions, 100 and below it became increasingly noisier. A higher N would be nice, but I didn't spend more time optimizing the performance for the simulation code beyond what was needed to get this working.
- Scaevolus 5y agoIf you want to get even more tweets, you could use twitter's streaming API with the keyword "Wordle": http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2014/07/twitter-analytics/ http://adilmoujahid.com/posts/2014/07/twitter-analytics/ It should allow capturing a significant fraction of the 250k daily wordle tweets.
- gojomo 5y agoBesides eliminating the superficially-impossible rows (like `YYYYM`), does it do anything against more-sophisticated chaffing, like one or more accounts posting possible-but-inaccurate hint grids pointing at an alternate answer?
- rogerallen 5y agoSPOILER ALERT: shows today's answer!
- benhamner 5y agoSorry about that! Just updated so today's guess is hidden by default (and you can click-to-unveil)
- rogerallen 5y agoThank you!
- G650 5y agovery nice. Thanks
- Karunamon 5y agoVery cool! One minor improvement here; if the user has toggled colorblind mode on, then their tweeted result will also have altered color blocks. Orange for right letter right place, and blue for right letter wrong place.
- evandale 5y agoThat's a really neat attention to detail! I haven't seen the colourblind boxes.
- codeflo 5y agoI wonder what percentage of these Twitter posts are fake (“OMG so lucky LOL”).
- rkimb 5y agoThis is a really cool approach, definitely did not think of trying this! If you'd prefer to play without the crowdsourced data, I spent a couple hours on the following dictionary search algo yesterday which can typically solve puzzles in 3-4 guesses: https://github.com/rgkimball/wordlebot https://github.com/rgkimball/wordlebot
- keredson 5y agonice! i did similar, but used character frequencies in the remaining word sets to rank: https://github.com/keredson/wordle_solver https://github.com/keredson/wordle_solver
- rkimb 5y agoI tried yours out, nice work yourself! Seems we took a similar approach in recalculating the letter distributions based on remaining words - both our algos solved it in 4 turns today. If I may make two small suggestions as a user, I noticed you have a dictionary with nearly 13k words which often results in invalid suggestions like 'clery' and 'meryl'. In testing I found the Scrabble dictionary to be much more likely to yield valid Wordle words (found here: https://github.com/redbo/scrabble https://github.com/redbo/scrabble), though the official Wordle answers tend to be an even smaller set of ~2,500 common words. Second, though the implementation is very clean in code (much more concise than mine!), I found the use of the green/gray/yellow methods to be a bit cumbersome when adding constraints. You could wrap these three in a method like guess(word, reply) where your response encodes the feedback as something like [g]=green, [b]=black, [y]=yellow: Given: [('arose', 27122), ('aeros', 27122), ('seria', 27095), ('riesa', 27095)] >>> w.guess('arose', 'bybby') vs. >>> w.gray('aos') >>> w.yellow('r', 2) >>> w.yellow('e', 5) You could even have the guess method trigger a new round of suggestions since the response implies that we've advanced a turn.
- Txoko 5y agoHperwordle works for me It defines the usable letters right on your keyboard.
- Txoko 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Asraelite 5y agoWhat are the "⬛ squares taking social media by storm"?
- devoutsalsa 5y agoIt's the text you copy/paste to share your Wordle results on social media.
- imadethis 5y agoHuh, I thought HN stripped out emojis from posts. Has that changed, or is there a limited subset that are available?
- croes 5y agoMaybe because ■ is part if ASCII? Edit: ⬛⬜ work, the colored ones don't.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
- wizzwizz4 5y ago⬛ and ■ are different characters. But it looks like HN still strips most emoji.
- user-the-name 5y agoIt is definitely not part of ASCII.
- zerocrates 5y agoThe black and white squares are in the older Unicode "Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrrows" block so I guess they're allowed. Several things like that are sort of "retroactively" emoji... there's a "display as emoji" or "display as text" character you can put after them. What HN does and doesn't allow seems somewhat arbitrary, things like the star emoji are in that same block and yet are not allowed as far as I can tell.
- madcow2011 5y agoThis is genius. I love it.
- hkmaxpro 5y ago> Note that all of these 243 possibilities aren't valid in practice. For example YYYYM will never be seen because if the first four letters are correctly placed and the fifth is also in the word, it will be correctly placed. Not true. For example if the correct answer is TWEED and you guess TWEET, then you’ll get YYYYM. Edit: As pointed out by two commenters, the actual implementation contradicts the following claim in the post: > “Maybe” - the letter is in the answer but in a different position If the correct answer is TWEED and you gess TWEET, you will still get YYYYN, because the actual implementation uses a different definition of “Maybe” than what is written in the post.
- unholiness 5y agoI believe in the actual implementation it's correct. You can confirm a letter is not doubled, when one of the two letters in your guess is gray.
- hkmaxpro 5y agoI only played it occasionally and haven’t encountered doubled letters, so I don’t know what the actual response would be. Maybe you’re right.
- jacobmischka 5y agoPosting with such assurance without knowing what the actual response would be, lmao. Very on-brand for HN (and myself too, honestly).
- hkmaxpro 5y agoI blindly trusted the post’s claim that “Maybe” means “the letter is in the answer but in a different position”. If you use that definition, you’ll arrive at the same conclusion. The post should be updated with the correct definition.
- jacobmischka 5y ago
- nerdjon 5y agoI like the idea of worldle But I hate that any guesses have to be words in its dictionary. As someone who was never really a fan of crosswords, the need to find a real word that fits 5 letters every time severely limits how I can enjoy it.
- cyborgx7 5y agoSeems like you'd be more interested in Master Mind. Here is an implementation from the great Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/guess.html https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/js/gues...
- del_operator 5y agoTwo or three guesses with Wordle using the ETAOIN SHRDLU I learned doing cryptopals has been very effective at reaching a solution. I usually have a first guess like SAINT then something like SCARE, CORED, etc eliminating vowels and frequent constants while also considering the most likely sequencing of matched characters or remaining characters. Also eliminating S, T, C really reveals there’s no TH, SH, SP, CK, etc and is one factor that gets me suspicious of repeated chars or rarer k, g and x combos.
- bushbaba 5y agoGuess the daily wordle by inspecting source code…yes every word is hard coded in the JavaScript in calendar order
- Axien 5y agoI am trying so hard to not know what Wordle is or how to play. Now it is showing up on Hacker News? Damn. I’ve not had this much trouble since I avoided Sudoku.
- doodpants 5y agoThe "original" Wordle[0] only lets you play once per day, so if potential addiction is your concern, it shouldn't be a problem. It should take up less than 5 minutes of your time per day. [0]https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/ https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
- cookie_monsta 5y ago> Now it is showing up on Hacker News? Only every day for the last two months https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=wordle&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jl6 5y agoLessons to be learned in the field of data anonymization!
- tills13 5y agothe point of wordle is to be simple, fun, and social so I don't think there's anything further to be learned here.
- jeffchien 5y agoWaiting for a bot that guesses based on Google Trends: * Wordle 218: https://i.imgur.com/PbYfLm6.jpg https://i.imgur.com/PbYfLm6.jpg * Wordle 221: https://i.imgur.com/pTPbquL.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pTPbquL.jpg
- avipars 5y agoWe'll need to do Wordle-SEO in 2022 ;) But I hope the game is increasing people's literacy... They should make a version for SAT words.
- nilay 5y agoOr take all the fun away and just get it through browser console ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ JSON.parse(localStorage.gameState).solution
- dag11 5y agoOr you can look at the source and see the list of words. They're sequential, so you know every future word. The "Wordle 222" is actually just the 222 index into the array.
- theiasson 5y agoThat's a real bummer. Is there any way the author can prevent this? Can he generate random indexes that don't repeat while keeping this random number generator code public?
- grenoire 5y agoThe only way to address this would be validating the answers server-side. Any information you leak in the locally executed code can be discovered without much effort. I think Wordle doesn't server-side validate because of volume, and also because it's a fun little game and cheating brings you nothing of value.
- tomjakubowski 5y agoWait, did Wordle start counting from 0?
- alana314 5y agoI use (not today's puzzle) cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v 'w' | grep -v 'a' | grep 't' | egrep '^...er$'
- quotha 5y agoAnd people think bitcoin wastes energy.
- olliej 5y agoSomething I’ve wondered about is how well you can guess what peoples guesses were from the images they post.
- cafed00d 5y agoComputer nerds strike wordle! Goddammit! How long before Skynet. Sigh. The end is nigh /s
- Boom_Rang 5y agoI like that it's robust to adversarial tweets! I did something similar last week using the Twitter Stream API: https://github.com/basile-henry/twitter-wordle https://github.com/basile-henry/twitter-wordle It's not resistant to adversarial tweets, but it usually collects enough tweets to have an answer in around 1 minute, so it's not too bad to restart if some bad tweets were sampled. Maybe I should try to use your wordle-tweets dataset to make it work offline as well. :)
- mrfusion 5y agoWould this be a good use of a hidden Markov model?
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago