Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

I could see how this might be fun, but today's word (I won't spoil it here) seems ill-advised for such a puzzle. When I saw the hint it made me laugh out loud. Why would the creator choose such a word (or such a hint)?

View on HN

No, this game is not fun. I've played it quite a few times and found it addictive, but not in a fun way. I had to force myself to stop playing it because I realized it was just frustrating and un-fun and you never get any better at it because there's no way to improve your reasoning about the similarity scores or ever become truly "good" at it.

That's because the words arent related in meaning; they're related by how often the words-as-symbols cooccur in a bank of historical documents.

It's based on news articles, so I've found it helpful in the final stages to switch from guessing words with similar meanings to guessing words you might see together in a headline. For example if you've got "rescued" you might go in the direction of "mountain" or "accident" rather than "assisted," "helped" etc.

But also I stopped playing because it wasn't fun anymore.

The hints definitely aren't manually chosen — they're just a word some distance closer to the target than you've gotten so far. And I wouldn't be surprised if the targets are randomly picked from the word2vec dataset, too.

Perhaps they should be manually chosen...the hint I received was a word that is semantically empty, but apparently co-occurs with today's word.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com