[HN Gopher] Show HN: Wordle over DNS
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Show HN: Wordle over DNS
Author : dgl
Score : 145 points
Date : 2022-02-19 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dgl.cx)
(TXT) w3m dump (dgl.cx)
| kseistrup wrote:
| I really like the idea of wordle-over-dns.
|
| I wish all wordle authors would use words with 5 unique letters
| and singular nouns or infinitive verbs, though.
| dgl wrote:
| Wordle itself doesn't use 5 unique letters though.
|
| Some of the words I've picked are a bit tricky, it's trickier
| than you think picking words!
| kseistrup wrote:
| I know the original Wordle also don't use 5 unique letters,
| that's why I wrote "all wordle authors" so you wouldn't feel
| singled out.
|
| I chose words for a Danish wordle, and distilled 64k
| dictionary words down to around 3k.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I see where you're coming from on 5 unique letters but have a
| strong preference the other way. The possibility of double
| letters adds a lot of interest to the game for me. But I can
| see how someone would find it annoying too.
|
| I'm curious about the singular nouns or infinitive verbs
| suggestion though. What's the thinking there? Also to be clear,
| are you advocating for no adjectives/adverbs, or are you just
| restricting which nouns/verbs are allowed and allowing other
| types of word to be unrestricted?
| ghaff wrote:
| The thinking is probably that if you allow plurals and
| certain other verb forms to any significant degree you
| probably end up with a disproportionate number of trailing
| "S" letters--which would be less interesting.
|
| The combination of five letters, the rules, and the number of
| guesses seem to calibrate the difficulty pretty well for me.
| Given enough time, I could probably solve most words
| eventually with just my brain. (In practice, I sometimes go
| to a dictionary program that's not wordle specific to tickle
| my brain once I know what I'm probably looking for.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > The thinking is probably that if you allow plurals and
| certain other verb forms to any significant degree you
| probably end up with a disproportionate number of trailing
| "S" letters--which would be less interesting.
|
| There's no reason it has to be noticeably disproportionate,
| the clues are curated and not just picked randomly from the
| list of words that are legal to guess.
|
| I guess I'm also curious if the suggestion is that all
| these words are illegal to guess or just not used as clues?
| ghaff wrote:
| It appears as if there are plurals in the words you can
| use to guess. I just tried PILLS and it worked. I have
| not yet run across a plural as the answer but I haven't
| looked at the word list.
| sprobertson wrote:
| 1.6% of possible answers end with "s" but none of those
| are plural. 30.5% of allowed guesses end in "s" however.
| kseistrup wrote:
| The reason for the restriction is that you make a near
| endless amount of words by allowing plural, past, future,
| genitive (at least in Danish, that doesn't take apostrophe in
| the genitive) et cetera. I'm unsure how I would restrict
| adjectives/adverbs, but the idea is that the words should
| exist as main entries in a dictionary.
|
| Here's where I come from:
|
| Decades ago I learned to play a word game which was more like
| MasterMind than Wordle, and it could be played with just pen
| and paper (later I have played it over sms, and over gratis
| bank transfers):
|
| Each participant writes down a secret 5-letter word (unique
| letters, singular nouns, no verbs) and take turns to guess
| the oppponent's word. The only clue you get for each guess,
| is how many correct letters your guess has. You do not get to
| know which letters are correct, if any, nor if they are
| correctly placed. It's a bit more challenging than Wordle,
| something that justifies the restrictions, but even with
| Wordle I think it's reasonable to use just the "root
| dictionary words", if I may call them so.
| ReaLNero wrote:
| The different forms of the word are really just a constant
| factor. Moreover, not all endings have the same number of
| letters, so it's easy to distinguish between e.g. eat vs
| eaten vs ate.
| pgl wrote:
| This is going straight on my list:
| https://twitter.com/pgl/status/1405614755000295427
| AviationAtom wrote:
| Now we know why it's always DNS breaking /s
| somtoxhi wrote:
| What's a good resource to gain more-indepth knowledge on DNS?
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| Awaiting the inevitable Wordle in CoffeeScript in pure CSS on the
| blockchain as a Service.
| Helloyello wrote:
| garaetjjte wrote:
| It would be better if it just represented replies as ASCII chars
| to avoid perl postprocessing. Most terminals probably doesn't
| display colored emoji anyway.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Neat. I thought for a moment it was just a script embedded in a
| TXT record, but you do communicate over DNS with a server-side
| implementation of the game. The perl bit is just to unescape the
| response.
|
| It uses a custom DNS server that returns the result as a TXT
| record for the domain <your guess>.wd.ip.wtf. You don't need to
| point directly at that server as it's registered as the
| nameserver for that domain.
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