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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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):
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).
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 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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!
I think this DOES make it way harder than regular wordle.
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.
What about HN doesn't comply with GDPR? It does not seem to have tracking cookies.
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.
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.
What is legitimate here. You and the site why does any third party have an interest?
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?
I tried WEIRD and it rejected it as not a word
It's a fun exercise to try and improve the rule by extending it compared to just switching to "E before I".
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).
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):
So it should be the same.
(assuming here that you're deliberately attempting to lose this game).
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).
- 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 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...
That rule doesn't make sense.
What if the answer is AORTA, and you want to guess ALBUM and then ALPHA?
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.
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.
What was the point in asking this (irrelevant) question?
trash smash abash gnash quash clash
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.
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 :)
It's pretty frustrating to immediately lose, and then have to undo to find out what the word was.
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.
Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31572258 - May 2022 (236 comments)
So Don’t Access Don’t Wordle