I spent way too much effort to win a game show on Dutch national TV | Hacker News Reader

I spent way too much effort to win a game show on Dutch national TV

vincenttunru.com

202 pointsVinnl37 comments

A shorter version with pictures is available in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/VincentTunru/status/1205527364739981312

Feel free to ask me anything!

Edit: Ah, and for Dutch people, the first actual episode can be viewed here: https://www.sbs6.nl/programmas/lingo/videos/Vk9EpXSlwas/ling...

Very cool. Some questions - How many games (?) in a row did you win and how much money was this? How many episodes did you appear on? How does this compare to other top players? Thanks.

> - How many games (?) in a row did you win

We won four in a row, then lost the fifth one in the final round due to two mistakes on our side and a bit of bad luck.

> and how much money was this?

When you reach the finals, you take part in what amounts to a lottery for which the number of tickets you get is determined by how well you play. If you win, you get €2500, if you lose, you get the amount of money you earned in the first round, which is comparatively negligible. We consistently got a reasonably high score in the finals, and with that won the lottery once, which I'd guess is about or slightly lower than the expected success rate.

Do note that the amount was per-team and before taxes, so in the end it amounted to a little bit more than €1000 per person. A nice little bonus, but probably lower than my usual rate given the amount of work put in, so it really was mostly about the fun we had doing it. (And an additional unexpected bonus is that it gave my brother quite some exposure as a comedian.)

> How many episodes did you appear on?

Five: the four we won, and the one we lost.

> How does this compare to other top players?

There haven't been that many episodes yet, and to be fair, I don't really watch the show usually, but it's certainly better than average (since most people just lose the first game they're in), and probably slightly better than the mean winner - though of course, we're doing it with no natural talent and being loyal viewers of the show. There are certainly quite a few who do better than we did though.

Very cool. Thanks for the details. Final question - how many rounds in a game?

There isn't actually a set number of rounds, I think it mostly depends on how long the rounds take. (I think there's about 15 minutes playing time for the first round.) I haven't rewatched an episode to keep track, but my guess would be it's about four five-letter words and four six-letter words. After that, there's always one seven-letter word (in which both teams take turns making guesses).

It always trips me up how ij is one letter in Dutch since I learned Dutch spelling with ij and not the y version. The y version was the normal Greek one.

For non-Dutchies: y = y and y = ij, they both have different sounds.

A few months ago, someone tried to register her newborn in Brussels (which is officially a bilingual city: Dutch and French) with a name starting with IJ, and had a very hard time convincing the French speaking civil servants that both characters had to be capitalized: https://www.bruzz.be/samenleving/geboorteaangifte-brussel-st...

Its not in the alphabet tho

Even though ij often fills a single square in puzzle, it is not a character in the Dutch alphabet. It is sometimes incorrectly assumed to be in place of y (y is only used for foreign words). It is a combination of i and j, but has special uppercasing rules in that they are uppercased together; e.g. IJzer (iron). There's even a Unicode codepoint assigned as well: ĳ (U+0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ), although its use is discouraged.

> There's even a Unicode codepoint assigned as well: ĳ (U+0133 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE IJ)

And that codepoint was actually massively helpful to represent the ij-as-single-letter in the practice application: https://lingo.vincenttunru.com

Some people are really inconsistent about this, insisting it's a single letter, despite it not having a place in the alphabet. Some do try to give it a place in the alphabet in place of the 'y', or before or after it but still insisting there's only 26 letters in the alphabet.

It's really a digraph, a phoneme made out of two characters. But it's an inconsistent digraph in that both characters are capitalised together, whereas with other digraphs, only the first is capitalised.

It's not entirely true that 'y' is only used in foreign words. It's used in import words that have been part of the Dutch language for a very long time now. 'Royaal' and 'symbool' are not spelled like that in any neighbouring language, so they've been thoroughly Dutchified over the centuries. They're not foreign anymore.

Love it! I'm learning Dutch in preparation for a move to the Netherlands next year, and I'm tempted to make this a goal just to feed my competitive nature.

And also, you've just given a lot of people blueprints for doing well, so you might actually make the game harder for teams on average. Go you!

I'm curious, where are you moving from? And what's taking you there?

The US.

My wife and I work remotely (for the same company), and we have to travel to Amsterdam a couple of times a year (at minimum) for work. She fell in love with it, and I'm interested in the adventure (and it's a great city). It would also be useful for work for us to be there, though not necessary by any means.

Looks like a lot of fun. Was the word that went viral the one with the "IJ" letter? Forgive my ignorance of Dutch.

It was! And the one that went viral includes an "ij" indeed, though it's a regular vowel sound in Dutch, similar to "oa" in English, so it occurs in many words.

Why would a word go viral?

One of the three best six-letter words starting with a "k" was what amounts to the Dutch version of "bitch". You usually say what word you are going to play before spelling it out, but to avoid having to say this word out loud -and as a joke, of course- my brother said "my ex-partner" before spelling that word.

That was an eye-opener. I don't think you'd use a word like that on a UK gameshow. I'm not sure how the producers would react if you did.

Mind you, Countdown, in which a series of random letters are placed onto a board, has had its moments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTrSUiHm4YY

I don't think most Dutch people wouldn't either (I was reluctant to do it), but I guess in practice, it's really not that big of a deal. There weren't any explicit rules about it, and it's a valid word that's listed in the dictionary. And in the end, I'm sure it's one of the most-viewed episodes they've had so far.

Here's the most legendary word ever spelled at this game, which can be understood even by people who speak English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7qxpAUKy4c

Given the examples you showed at Countdown, I'd expect it to be perfectly possible on a UK game show as well?

There's the famous Dutch liberalism in action!

The thing about Countdown is that the letters are drawn at random by the host. So if they happen to spell out a rude word, or have a rude anagram, that's can't be avoided, and it's nobody's fault.

The dude said something that sounded close to "my ex" in English and then spelled "Kutwijf" and there's laughter. So one could assume it's not a nice word.

Yeah he said literally "mijn ex" -> my ex. It wasn't a nice word :P

It's a contraction of two words, the first of which is a swear word and the second is a very impolite way to refer to a woman.

I saw Andries a couple of weeks ago at a comedy night in Utrecht. His demonstration of memorization of "best" words was impressive!

Did you come across the word “Tnetennba”?

The words were limited to five- or six-letter words, and I only took words that occurred more than 500 times in the data set - otherwise I probably would have!

Here is my version of this game I made in early high school a couple years back. So, please forgive the crudeness... https://jondolan.io/fives/

I did not know of this game at the time, but I did hear from people that it was basically Mastermind with words (although I have not played that). The inspiration was a teacher of mine who used to work as a nuclear technician and when he had the graveyard shift, he would play the game with the other technician on duty over the phone.

It's originally called Jotto, and Mastermind is a generalization/de-specification of it that came later.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto

I was most disappointed that Google couldn't translate the words from Dutch. Random other site got it right away.

How does the one-week winning streak compare to the longest one ever achieved?

The show recently changed its format so that people who win are allowed to come back the next day, so the longest one ever just happened to have been set the week before - they took part in eleven episodes.

We certainly weren't the best ones ever, partly due to our own ability to find the correct words even when many letters are given, and partly due to luck playing a significant role in the actual game. (I didn't go into the luck-based elements in the post, because our strategy couldn't influence that.)

"My first guess is 'actor'"

Should that be 'actors'?

Ah, you are right, I'll fix it right away. Thanks for reporting it!

Hilarious, love seeing this on HN =) Thanks for the write up!

Really cool.

How much did you guys win?

Thanks. I detailed our wins here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21801310

tl;dr We mostly did this for fun.

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