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Hexcodle

hexcodle.com

226 pointschat59 comments

This would work better with 3 guesses for R, G and B rather than 6 hex digits

6 hex digits or 9 digits for RGB is better? In what way do you figure that to be true?

I think parent means guessing the three numbers of an RGB value not the 9 digits

i guess that person is just thoroughly unfamiliar with editing colors in hex. it's just as easy for me to think in hex or rgb as it's just something i've done for a really long time, so it's harder to equate to why one would be "better" than the other in their opinion. now, me trying to use HSL is a whole other matter.

I said "3 guesses", not 9... but then again I've only been writing colors in hex for 18-19 years, so not sure if that makes qualifies as "thoroughly unfamiliar"

I totally missed how you simply meant "guesses" and turned that into something it wasn't by meaning the number of digits to type. I honestly have no idea how I did that. Kind of like when someone is talking to you, but you're actually paying attention to something else so you reply with something that has no bearing whatsoever to what was actually asked. Yeah, that's what I'm going with

Better for a guessing game.

Guessing a number between 0 and 15 takes at max 5 guesses, guessing a number between 0 and 255 makes the game harder.

The point is that the way it is now, you have to guess 3 significant numbers and 3 insignificant numbers.

Guessing whether 1st, 3rd or 5th digit is 5 or 6 is something you can be trained for, a skill.

Guessing the 2nd, 4th, or 6th digit is an entirely different task and more a purely guessing game as they barely affect the color.

It sort of doesn't make sense..

Would be cool if part of (or the entirety of) your score was the accuracy of your first guess. That's the part that takes skill, after that, it's not so interesting.

I found myself only looking at the arrows after making my first guess. Fun game nonetheless.

It immediately devolves to a binary search after the first guess.

Or even from the first guess, I started with #777777

The player has five guesses. Four are enough to do a brute force binary search. Where's the fun?

I believe, a game would be more fun if, instead of nearing on one colour in several guesses, a player would guess once for several colours. Then one could really test their hex skills, not knowing the basics of search algorithms.

You can only play once before it kicks you out. Kinda lame.

Also, I don’t think the hints are correct. It told me the digit 0 was “way higher” than the actual digit.

I interpreted <<double up arrow>> to mean the correct solution was “way higher” than my guess, not that my guess was “way higher”.

The wording is potentially confusing, though.

You can only play once before you realize you can cheat using the browser DOM inspector.

Nice idea though.

LOL

You can cheat at Monopoly by just taking more money out of the box. You can cheat at Wordle by googling the answer for that day.

> Also, I don’t think the hints are correct. It told me the digit 0 was “way higher” than the actual digit.

You have this backwards.

Isn't playing once per day the whole draw of wordle-likes?

You only need 5 guesses to find any number between 0 and 15. With 4 you can find any number in a range of 15 numbers.

Just do a binary search.

Oh, Knowing that some browsers display higher and lower characters (where I had black squares) would indeed make it easier.

All I had was the colour diff to go by. I only managed to get got the major digits.

Did you go to great lengths to suppress emoji, are you running on Windows 7, or is it a bug?

My stock Manjaro Linux system also displayed them as squares, installing noto-fonts-emoji fixes it.

Hey all! My name is Hannah, 1/2 of the Hexcodle dev team. First of all, thank you for playing! We woke up today astonished with the amount of visits on our site and we can't thank you enough! Reading through these comments and we have been working on some of the feedback from you all: we have been working on the concept of a points system so playing will hopefully be a bit more engaging for those familiar with the binary search method! We're hoping to have this implemented within the next few weeks.

If you have any questions or want to give us feedback, we have a feedback form in our navbar, make sure to leave an email if you'd like me to follow up with you in the future.

Thanks again :)

Is there any reason to look at the target instead of just going for binary search? The least significant digit is kinda meaningless to guess without fixing the more significant one.

While I agree the LSD is somewhat meaningless, I personally find it fun to test my color matching/mixing. Binary search circumvents that (at least for the most significant digit); though I agree it really only applies for the first and maybe second guess.

For instance, my initial guess was off by (+1,-1,-1,+3,-1-2) and my first impulse was to look at the target and see that I had too much red and not enough green.

To have fun, perhaps?

Games that can be trivially solved are generally not fun. Nobody* plays noughts and crosses for fun once they have figured out the solution.

*standard HN disclaimer

It's non-trivial if you apply a computer science algorithm, true. Scrabble's trivial if you have a dictionary, chess is trivial if you have Stockfish installed...checkers...do they have a Stockfish?

More directly: it's actually pretty fun to guess these straight up. disclaimer: I have a strong bias towards having fun with color stuff - c.f. https://material.io/blog/science-of-color-design.

RGB is neigh-meaningless, true. Here, I get to exercise my intuition I should balance between red and blue based on warmth via hue of the color. Then, jack up G to match the lower of the two if its a light color / has high tone.

Scrabble is far from trivial with a dictionary :)

Exactly why we used to play with various levels - everyone could refer to the two letter word sheet with Q without U words also, and the players given a handicap could use the dictionary, though limited to 30 seconds on their turn.

Ehhh no not what I meant. Scrabble is far from trivial even if you have a solver that shows all possible word combinations with your hand.

Dude come on lol

High level scrabble play isn’t a greedy algo to get the most points every turn with the best words. Positioning around bonuses matters more.

> It's non-trivial if you apply a computer science algorithm, true

Noughts and crosses? It's non-trivial if you're 8. No fancy algorithms needed. The other examples you mentioned can't be solved by an 8 year old in their heads.

> do they have a Stockfish?

No, which is why chess is still fun. You don't need a computer or even a pen and paper to solve noughts and crosses, or this.

When I was younger we played way too much noughts and crosses with "infinite" board trying to get five in a row and it never stopped being fun. The "standard" 3x3 board was just 100% unfun and pointless to us even though we had no idea back then that there is a "solution".

That game is gomoku, commonly played on 15x15, and is a strong first-player win, where the game is solved. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/gomoku

You’re right. I see the target colour as more of a nice visualisation of my quantitative working

Brilliant and probably building a skill that's actually useful (if a little esoteric).

To avoid the binary search making it trivial, maybe just tell you which guesses are correct and which other guesses match a value somewhere, like yellow letters in wordle. I think that would be more interesting but I have only played it in my head so the error margin could be significant. Of the top of my head I would use the lesser digits to search the space systematically while making the major digits match the color as best I could. Still it is fun as is and I have added it to my window of daily puzzle tabs.

Or maybe not tell which digits match, and instead give a different type of clue, like Euclidean distance between the two colors.

Considering that colors are a three-dimensional quantity with ambiguous ordering (#FF0000 and #00FF00 being equal distance from #000000 for example) I’m not sure how you’re thinking a binary search would trivialize this?

This is what I get for not actually clicking the link..each of the dimensions are given independent indications of being too high or too low

Hex is always specific ordering, R > G > B. They're all 0 through F (16 digits). It gives you a "higher, lower, equals" on every digit. That means it's 6 cases of binary searches, 2^4 = 16, so that's all you're going to need.

Fun game! Can you add an indicator of which guess is which / their order? I was looking for the most recent guess at the bottom of the list, but it's actually on top

Hmm, just did it again today and I got the same color as yesterday? It’s past 8 AM here, when does it change?

Seems like a fun way to train your eye for recognizing colors. Only missed 2 playing the way I'm sure it was intended to be. Binary search is cool and all but, if you want to "cheat", right-click > inspect element is far more efficient.

Easy/hard switch at the top doesn't seem to do anything?

Maybe instead of hints for 4 bit summarize them to combined hints for the full bytes in hard-mode?

Fun game... a nice idea especially since it's a game that can help you imagine hex numbers in relation to RGB colour components.

Can we get one with OKLCH please?

OKLCH is literally made with intention to make colors easily guessable

I've seen a pretty usable 3x5 font. I'm sure those have been done multiple times.

I thought it was a number game and realized it was colour code only after solving :)

I wonder if metrics would show any difference in win-rate for HSL over RGB

Had a laugh doing today's round. Proper nerd fun. Good job.

Very cool idea for a wordle alternative!

No support for 3 digit hex codes?

Fun game!

good fun

I got Hexcodle #140 in 3 guesses!

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