Contexto: Find the Secret Word
contexto.me
contexto.me
The "bar" visualization is also nicer to track how close/far you are.
I think there's a really approachable game somewhere in this space, but it needs to implement something along the lines of an auto hinting system.
I imagine that for every guess, you could get a word or two that is similar (to help you understand what part of the word's context is important), and maybe words that are further away to help understand what isn't important?
Makes me wonder what 3D (or even 4D) version would be like.
Also: Interesting game!
(spoilers for today below)
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These are some of my guesses for today, in order of similarity:
kilometer 3501
authority 3149
tomato 2960
exercise 2357
fruit 2008
healthy 1715
run 972
input 927
power 909
foot 598
meter 300
control 159
Initially, I got some traction on the site and even some strangers started promoting it.
But I soon realized that there is very little marketing spend reward. The customers spend no money and ad revenue per user is abysmal. This means you can't use conventional channels and have to rely on people actually finding it fun and recommending it to others.
Although it was getting recurring traffic with zero promotion, it still couldn't reach a self sustaining level and I had to shut it down.
You can see Youtube video of it here: https://youtu.be/uLoMd0TkGKk
The point is: Getting the right puzzle formula is extremely hard and every puzzle will not grow like "Wordle".
This site sounds like you could get away with free static hosting after pregenerating a few hundred puzzles locally.
The basic idea is sound, but it's painful to both start and end a game, and winning isn't very satisfying.
One of wordle's biggest flaws is "the opening". If you're going to have a daily puzzle, it shouldn't be exactly the same board to start every day. Games are so fast that this idea doesn't totally work there, but I think it would be better if they gave you a starting word every day.
The same rule applies here, I think. Your opening move set is basically fixed, and no one is really interested in learning the theory of that. Make the opening less tedious by starting with a couple of random words already played. This has two added benefits. The simplest is that it serves as a tutorial, in all likelihood, if you gave a list of prechosen words and their scores, and a textbox, people would already completely understand the rules of the game without any explanation at all. This is very valuable to a game like this, as it lowers friction.
The second benefit is more specific to this game, but it gives players a lot of hypotheses to test new words against from the outset. You want to reward play that deduces the next word not only from similarity to chosen close words, but also dissimilarity from chosen far words. In order to do that though, you have to choose a pretty large disparate set of far words. This hurts your score and is not particularly dependent on the days puzzle (ie you should pick about the same set every time). The game should probably do this for you, at the beginning.
Finally, you should reveal how many letters are in the target word. I don't want to just probe the model with synonyms. That's extremely tedious. give me enough information to make a plausible guess.
You could even consider a variant of the game where you're only allowed to guess words with the target number of letters, which might actually be mroe fun.
https://greatfilter.itch.io/lexicode
I am currently remaking it as a web app rather than a unity app.
In redactle winning by pure luck still happens, but at least in hindsight you can tell where you went astray, in contexto the answer often turns out to be "because you aren't a high dimensional word embedding trained by Open AI".
After getting good scores with <zvpebjnir naq bira, V gubhtug vg zvtug or cbg>. It's a strange world where we can't speak of <pbbxjner> to AIs anymore because they think you're speaking of a-drug-which-must-apparently-not-be-named
https://rot13.com/ (side fun fact: DeepL detects this text as Danish; Google and Bing just give up and default to English)
Can we actually assert a 'natural semantic order'? I've always thought this was a fundamental aspect of our cognition, that we have 2 distinct ways of ordering: names and numbers. Outside of lexical ordering (which is ordering a representation not the things themselves), names can at best be ordered in a DAG. Pretty much half of computer science is converting names into numbers so we can compute over them.
I think i lucked out by landing a 'green' word i.e., a close word as first guess today
I played semantle for a few days and it used ri take hundreds of guesses sometimes
so not sure if we can do much better than 10-20 guesses
another word with a meaning close to the previous one -> this word doesn't count
OK, thanks for making this but I don't why I can't say the_word_which_shall_not_be_named - it is a perfectly valid word after all even if some feel offended by the mere mentioning of it.
Input as guesses:
digit
number
car
compare
Once you got the solution, please explain to me how it works again.
Your explanation is likely to be accurate in the case of celsius, but it seemingly doesn't fit on this other game/answer.
I don't want to spoil the answer to that game, but to me it is hard to believe that both "car" and "compare" are nearer than "digit" or "number" to the answer if it is based on number of occurences in context.
13 8 14
Pure luck.
3 1 2
temperature 1
heat 5
hot 83
light 292
sun 496
burn 1066
car 2663
girlfriend 16293
blacksmith 20611