Don't Wordle | Hacker News Reader

Don't Wordle

dontwordle.com

397 pointsHbruz0130 comments

12935 -> TIZZY (5625) -> OXBOW (2674) -> GRUFF (858) -> MAMMA (195) and I'll let you guess the rest but my next choice left 43 words, and I survived with only 4 words possible.

The rules not letting use a letter you know isn't in the target word drastically cuts your choices, your best bet is to use as few unique letters per word as you can, and as uncommon letters as you can, but as all normal words need vowels you'll be forced into only picking a vowel from the target word soon enough. Try to find letters that are in the word as late as possible so you're not locked into having to use them.

Once you are forced to use letters from the target word, avoid placing them in the right place. Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA), and a rule for not letting you put a known letter in a place you know it doesn't go (so after MAMMA, you can't have HALVE because you know there's not an A in second place, nor ALPHA because you know there's not an A in fifth place).

The best I could do with today's word, and the wordlist, but no scoring function to minmax the rules:

- FUFFY (8159) (shipping of Faith and Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

- IMMIX (4544) (to mix or blend)

- ZOCCO (2142) (low plinth, from the Italian word for sock)

- QAJAQ (530) (alternative form of kayak)

- TRATT (155) (clipping of trattoria)

- KHAPH (7) (alternative form of khaf, the 11th letter of the Hebrew alphabet)

I get the feeling that if this game had 7 steps instead of 6, it would almost always be impossible.

I had two word possibilities left at the end, so it's possible.

Theoretically, you could still win today's if there were 8 steps. The ninth is the word you have to avoid.

I haven't found a way to win today with 9 steps.

https://gist.github.com/erikcorry/b21723a0ba49c044b03a6030dc...

Edit: Using some of your words you can get to 9 steps (10 including the word you have to avoid): https://gist.github.com/erikcorry/d55d263b129eb7a56c8c212296...

> Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA),

That rule doesn't make sense.

What if the answer is AORTA, and you want to guess ALBUM and then ALPHA?

The sibling comment pointed it out; MAMMA is revealed with one yellow A and one grey A, meaning it has told you there's only one A. If the answer was AORTA, then both As in MAMMA would be yellow.

> If the answer was AORTA, then both As in MAMMA would be yellow

Why would the last A be yellow and not green? It's the correct letter in the correct location. MAMMA should be gray, yellow, gray, gray, green.

Oops, yes. In that case, if the answer was AGAIN, both As in MAMMA would be yellow (as opposed to one yellow one grey)

> Sadly there's a rule not letting you use a known letter more than once in a word (once A is known, you can't write ALPHA)

This is not entirely correct (or at least it's worded a bit weirdly).

If you know that A goes in a certain place you can still try a word using A more than once. It's only once you know that A does not appear twice (because you tried a word containing A twice, and the second A way gray!) then you can no longer use A twice.

In your case you tried MAMMA which contained 2 As and the second one gave you the information that there's no second A.

Are there no words with the same letter three or more times?

If there was a second of the same letter, but in the wrong place, it would be yellow. If it's gray, that means there is no repetition of that letter. So once you've seen that the second one is gray, you have the information you need to know that letter is not repeated.

Grepping /usr/share/dict/words shows 110 words that have five letters and the same letter 3 or more times, e.g. sassy, added, daddy, nanny, melee, levee, mummy

It also accepted GEESE

Mamma has 3 M's.

There obviously are, e.g., mamma.

What was the point in asking this (irrelevant) question?

I read a bit too quickly over "It's only once you know that A does not appear twice", thinking it disregarded the case where A appears three or more times, but if read well that was addressed in the remainder of the sentence.

How many times do distinct letters appear in the word mamma? Do not write code to produce an answer.

If you enjoy clicking things you can spend hours in their cookie consent boxes untickinv the several hundred individual ‘legitimate interest’ tick boxes for individual vendors

Ublock seems to work with this one.

Yeah, I didn't even see the popup

No reject all button means a closed tab.

It's not like a "reject all" button actually rejects all. They get to decide what "reject all" means in the, well, popup that you just rejected.

Only hundreds? I ended up on Thingiverse by accident yesterday it’s

  RESPONSIBLE USE OF YOUR DATA
  We and our 1022 partners…

It's your browser's job to protect you, not the website's. There's no guarantee that a "reject all" button does anything, anyway. Instead, just dismiss the banner however and clear the site's cookies in the browser when you're done. On Firefox, you can clear your cookies in 3 clicks, use the little button on the left side of the URL bar and hit "Clear cookies and site data" and then Confirm.

*browser extensions' job

Cookie consent usually also covers fingerprinting. Clearing cookies won't protect you from that, not giving your consent may in some jurisdictions.

Has that ever been enforced? I don't see any real reason to trust that clicking on a div actually does anything.

Proof that regulation does not work.

Wow I can't believe this showed up on the front page years later. That's fun! I am still new to using Google AdSense and am enjoying the wrath of HN on this thread! Hope everyone can still enjoy the game today. Thank you for the feedback!

We are asked to allow hundreds of cookies, not just a few, to play the game.

yes top of hacker news and loaded with tracking information and a popular game so likely to garner lots of attention

What website isn't?

The most shocking part is that Americans care about appearing to follow GDPR, for some reason. For example, HN blatantly doesn't comply and doesn't plan to.

> HN blatantly doesn't comply

What about HN doesn't comply with GDPR? It does not seem to have tracking cookies.

Apparently they won't delete your old comments if you ask them to.

I'm someone who goes to somewhat absurd lengths to avoid tracking, but HN's policy doesn't bother me because I know the data exists elsewhere and deleting it here won't make a jot of difference to that.

I'm not entirely sure they'd need to comply. The question is what the purpose of the data being collected was, but seems to me that if you emphasise the whole idea that this is a conversation (which HN does in several ways) then actually "We don't delete comments" is defensible.

If I'm reading a thread about a problem I'm having in a video game on Reddit and it goes "This is very frustrating because I can't get a rabbit to teleport", then a reply which is [deleted] and then "Oh! Thanks so much, I'd never have figured that out" I'm in exactly the same place as the original poster, but now with the additional agony of knowing that there was a correct solution and that it's hard to figure out what it is - ugh.

Right to be forgotten is part of GDPR even though most people only think of cookie banners. There's no one-click export, either.

Like most of the GDPR "Right to be forgotten" is not an absolute right. As you'll quickly discover when you insist that the bank needs to "forget" that you owe them a lot of money, there are plenty of legitimate reasons they can decline to "forget" you despite your invocation of a "right".

That's cute. Your records are yours. Barring some agreement to the contrary, I have no right to mess with them or inspect them, even if they contain information about me.

That's an interesting opinion, but EU law says the opposite.

EU law only matters to those subject to it.

Which is why I questioned American websites complying with GDPR, and pointed out that HN doesn't feel any need to.

There are now some U.S. state laws that impose requirements for notice and consent.

Of course the one time I get it in 2 guesses is in this version

Got to the sixth attempt, 2 words remaining, of course I picked the right one.

I picked the right one out of twelve.

Having 12 options possible on the last guess is actually very good.

It was only my last guess because I lost :P I had three remaining.

What the hell, same here. My initial guess was "CELLO", from there on I had 32 other possible words and somehow I got the right one?

My first guess got 3green+2gray. Should have undone immediately.

Nice. I play Last Word daily.

https://dragonfjord.com/lastword/

It's the same goal, but everyone starts with the same word each day, which does not include any letters in the "last word".

No undos in Last Word. My average is 8.7 letters. Really hoping to get it to 9.

Well this sure makes Wordle feel a lot easier!

and I still can't believe it took me more than 3 guesses

Some of the suggested plays for yellow EA and green H after the first guess:

    ALMEH
    BEKAH
    BELAH
    DEASH
    OBEAH
    SELAH

Not much fun to play with a dictionary like this :-/

And yet it didn’t accept JORTS :/

I can respect finding JORTS unacceptable.

Many places don’t accept jorts. :P

In the same vein, last year I took on a good old fashioned optimization problem for Worlde. Given a guess list and answer list, find all of the “perfectly bad” Worlde games in the shortest time. This means never reusing letters or finding any of the letters in the word. I got it from over 35 hours down to a mere 20 seconds.

Results and code here: https://github.com/SMarioMan/worst-wordle

Like it, but would love a "No Undo" option, or at least, "don't force undo".

My friends and I share our wordle results daily. Would like to add this, but so that if you guess in three or four tries, that's OK, that's just your score for the day. Right now game forces me to undo if I have reduced option space to fewer words than there are remaining guesses, and that's quite annoying for how we'd want to play :)

One thing I find odd about the rules: it forces you to respect what you've learned via green or yellow tiles, but not gray tiles. The spirit of the rules suggests once you've learned a letter is not in the word, you shouldn't be able to reuse that letter. Perhaps that would simply make the game too difficult, though.

It didn't let me guess things that had already been eliminated with gray tiles.

Isn't that rule 3?

It does - you can type them but it rejects the word when you submit it.

I think this DOES make it way harder than regular wordle.

Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31572258 - May 2022 (236 comments)

Cool. Surprisingly difficult. I made an art game inspired by wordle some years ago. My dad and I still play it daily. https://artle.eu

I tried playing this as if its wordle & got it in 2 guesses. How do they do this ??? That's next to impossible in wordle & the probalities seem like they should be the same?

The game is cheating I guess

By playing Wordle well, you are essentially eliminating as much unknown words as possible each turn, e.g., SALET alone takes 12974 words down to 34 here today.

But this is like Wordle hard mode with the forced letters, so the optimal strategy is probably to invert and eliminate as little words as possible each turn.

I got pretty far here using weird words, but PIZZA turned out to be a terrible first guess for Don't Wordle (eliminating ~75% of the words):

    *      12974
    PIZZA   3169
    AQUAS    290
    SAWED     17
    MEASE      7
    LEASH      0

Wordle hard mode (which I play) generally limits you to a similar degree as this game - it's less strict programmatically, but anyone willingly opting into hard mode is likely following the same rules as are enforced here.

So it should be the same.

(assuming here that you're deliberately attempting to lose this game).

No, the strategy in Wordle of solving hard mode by guessing the target word vs in Not Wordle preserving along as possible in Not Wordle by not guessing the target word are not the same thing at all.

Huh?!

I think you really did just get lucky. It does pick a word up front at the start.

This is great!

A couple years ago I adapted a quite similar concept for the PUCO 8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=106664 My version allowed players to re-use letters though. Yours is much more interesting and challenging.

I remember being pretty proud of my compression system that let me fit several thousands of words on the cartridge.

This game got surprisingly big for what once was an LLM prompt "Create an opposite version of wordle and throw AdSense on it"

Unfortunately, my goto starter word is 4 green letters.

It's pretty frustrating to immediately lose, and then have to undo to find out what the word was.

If your first word is four greens it's actually pretty good: you get to know four letters to avoid with just one undo!

Sure, but if you count undo as a partial game over (which is heavily implied), it's better to just be able to see what the word is and move on.

> count undo as a partial game over

Not at all. Contrary to other games where undos are cheating, here they are part of the game. Without them it would be 80% luck and only 20% strategy.

> which is heavily implied

I can't find anything that implies this. It explicitly says:

> This uses undos deliberately rather than only as an emergency

while avoiding undos is mentioned at the end as "The Purist approach", which I read as slightly mocking.

I see it like a chess problem where you have to find the best sequence of moves, so you start off with an intial move, then backtrack, explore another idea, etc. Not like a chess match where of course you cannot undo any move.

I'd enjoy it if the rules with some graphics are displayed near the game, for newbies.

e.g. show a word with some green letters and that they have to be in the same spot in the other word. e.g. FUBAR with green B -> __B__

FUBAR with yellow R -> RRRR_ (with gray background and white R to signify "has to be placed somewhere here")

And for the gray letters, I guess.. show them next to the _____ in a trash can?

It took me a minute to find out that I needed to close the instructions to see the actual game. A Play button would have been nice.

This is amazing, and incredible difficult (or I'm terrible), after ~10 minutes I can't even get in a third guess!

    *      12974
    QAJAQ   1979
    PZAZZ    861
    OBANG    449
    URARI    232
    FLAFF     58
    DWALM     10

(totally didn't cheat: https://github.com/murfalo/dontwordle-assistant)

I hope NYT lawyers don't come for you. They did for many other variants of this. Maybe reconsider the name?

Do they go after people using similar names or just any game with similar mechanics?

Just the trademark, that I've seen.

IIUC, game mechanics are not copyrightable.

The ads, the banners. Immediate exit.

Do you even adblock, bro.

What word list are you using as the valid words list? The old solutions list from nytimes wordle is no longer very relevant, e.g. the last month or so has produced several Wordle solutions that were not on it.

This is quite fun, but I can’t believe the amount of cookies it wants to set!

I had my ad blocker turned off temporarily and it was a strange experience.

This is a great demonstration of why Wordle’s Hard Mode is actually easier.

My problem with hard mode is it leaves a lot up to luck. If it was 3 letters and ended in “at” it could be pat, mat, bat, hat, cat, rat, sat, etc. so all you can do is to pick one and hope for the best.

It puts a floor on the player's skill. That's not the same as being easier. There are game states that are certainly winnable without hard mode rules but do not allow the player to force a win in hard mode.

Pretty cool. I wonder at what point it makes sense to actually try to guess what the actual word is and then figure out which words you should guess in order to avoid it.

I guessed it, undo'd back ... and still lost

I had to deny hundreds of tracking “partners” wanting to place cookies - without a ‘reject all’ option - before I could even access the website…

So Don’t Access Don’t Wordle

FLAIL (232) --> CLEVE (24) --> CLUMP (4) --> CLOUS (3) --> CLOUD (2) --> CLOUR (1)

12 unused letters + 1 words remaining = No margin for error

Is the word list complete?

I tried WEIRD and it rejected it as not a word

that "i before e except after c" rule often gets taken too seriously

Oh I've messed that one up before

i think it's kind of beautiful that weird is a weird word

Isn’t there more exceptions to that rule than there are examples where it’s correct?

Yep, at least on most static word lists.

It's a fun exercise to try and improve the rule by extending it compared to just switching to "E before I".

Only if you forget the final part, “…when it sounds like ‘ee’”.

That’s a recent addendum and is far from universally taught.

Clicked expecting commentary on why playing NYTs wordle, and perhaps other games, was problematic for some reason. Found a game instead.

I sense this is not winnable for all Wordle dictionary words. Is that provably the case?

There are actually a very large number of solutions for every word. I once wrote an algorithm to enumerate all possible solutions for a given word and I was surprised at the results.

hmm, if you quote unquote must use the letters locked in from the previous example, then they should be brought down to the previous row and locked in by default no? a robot could have fixed that for lessthan 5000 tokens i bet.

You can use hints, after that I could find the right sequence

trash smash abash gnash quash clash

I see that terrible cookie permission window (62 legitimate interest) and I close the window,

It is too hard to be fun :P

(Un)related; does anyone know where to play the non-NYT Wordle version?

The original version of Wordle was purchased by the NYT and then Josh took down his copy, so there's no canonical "non-NYT" version anymore.

I'm sure someone has the original saved somewhere, I had it on an old work computer.

Funny idea, it turned out to be a bit more difficult than I thought

What does "you have already eliminated the letter T" mean?

The word doesn't contain the letter T.

It means you previously guessed a word with T in it and it wasn't marked at green (correct spot) or yellow (word contains letter in different spot).

You already guessed a word that had a “T” in it, and the game confirmed that “T” is not in the word. So you can’t guess another word with a “T”.

I love wordle and dontwordle. What I love more is Poople.io.

Legitimately a much better game than actual Wordle.

Dang it. I accidentally got the word in two!!!

Why is the word “satan” not allowed?

(meta comment) the chit chat about cookies is off topic and pointless

Disappointing that this seems to only be a "daily" game, and not have a "just play" mode that uses random words. First thing that I look for with any game that presents itself as "daily" is "where's the non-daily mode".

Be happ-ole? (Insert whistling)

Ahahhaha funny! xD

got it on 2nd turn. I am terrible at this.

So including me, you're like the fourth person in this section to get it on the second turn. That's peculiar.

The goal isn't explained clearly and simply enough.

The goal is to get mony from clicks in "legitimate interest"

What is legitimate here. You and the site why does any third party have an interest?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com