[HN Gopher] Contexto: Find the Secret Word
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       Contexto: Find the Secret Word
        
       Author : dgavrilov
       Score  : 83 points
       Date   : 2023-03-05 07:00 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (contexto.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (contexto.me)
        
       | ouid wrote:
       | Something is missing, I feel like.
       | 
       | 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.
        
       | spaceman_2020 wrote:
       | It's a little janky. My word was "temperature". I got to "water"
       | (no. 29) and then got stuck. Words leading up to it were rain,
       | cloud, storm. Hard to take the leap from there to "temperature"
        
         | ivanmontillam wrote:
         | I had it easier, won on 9 guesses:
         | 
         | temperature 1
         | 
         | heat 5
         | 
         | hot 83
         | 
         | light 292
         | 
         | sun 496
         | 
         | burn 1066
         | 
         | car 2663
         | 
         | girlfriend 16293
         | 
         | blacksmith 20611
        
         | thornewolf wrote:
         | You might want to remove the word for spoiler's sake. It is the
         | same for everyone, like Wordle
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | Keeping it generic I started with some identical words. It took
         | me a little bit to realize I was getting some conflicting
         | things (i.e. opposites that were similar) so needed to change
         | the kind of word I was looking for. Wouldn't really call it
         | janky because of that though, trying to figure out what could
         | be related to the words so far is the point not a side effect.
         | Looking at the final closest words I might have been upset
         | having put in something like #4 and getting lost though.
        
       | azeemba wrote:
       | Seems similar to https://semantle.com/ but backed by a different
       | "similarity" calculation.
       | 
       | The "bar" visualization is also nicer to track how close/far you
       | are.
        
         | pimanrules wrote:
         | I might as well take this opportunity to plug my clone of
         | Semantle which uses a tSNE visualization. I've heard many
         | people say this helps them visualize the chains of logic in
         | their guesses.
         | 
         | https://semantle.pimanrul.es/
        
           | mmastrac wrote:
           | Yours has the best interface I've seen so far, but the words
           | still feel kind of obscure when I'm clicking the hint button.
           | Ideally those should be limited to maybe the top 10,000
           | english words.
           | 
           | 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?
        
         | ttpphd wrote:
         | I made this in Jan 2022. It's prior art, but I was learning
         | Unity at the time so it is a little janky. In my oh so very
         | humble opinion as its creator, a better guessing game because
         | of the initial hint tuning.
         | 
         | https://greatfilter.itch.io/lexicode
        
       | brugidou wrote:
       | In french: https://cemantix.certitudes.org/
        
         | sodimel wrote:
         | We used to play the french version a few months back. It's a
         | nice game!
        
       | the_third_wave wrote:
       | _some word_ - > a high score
       | 
       |  _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.
        
       | barking_biscuit wrote:
       | Bonus points if you can do some prompt engineering to instruct
       | ChatGPT how to play the game.
        
       | prakhar897 wrote:
       | Few months back, I also tried to create a short puzzle game
       | called Diffudle. The game was basically AI Art + Wordle. You were
       | given an AI generated image and you have to guess the prompt for
       | it.
       | 
       | 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".
        
       | ajjenkins wrote:
       | Got today's word in 77 guesses. According to the game that's not
       | a good score, but I was impressed I was able to figure it out at
       | all. Definitely much harder than Wordle.
        
         | irrational wrote:
         | I got it in 31. All it says for me is "Congrats!" What did it
         | say for you?
        
       | rubslopes wrote:
       | I don't think it works very well. Trying not to give too much of
       | a spoiler, today's Portuguese word is a noun. When I tried the
       | "verb form" of that noun, I got a score of 207. This led me away
       | from the correct word. I finally got it right in 30 guesses.
        
         | thornewolf wrote:
         | That's a tough problem when generating word embeddings. Bodies
         | of text will rarely write "walking walk" or "the dancing dance"
         | consequently leading naive implementations to consider them
         | unrelated.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | dfc wrote:
       | It's weird that Celsius, Kelvin and Fahrenheit were so far apart.
        
         | myself248 wrote:
         | The way I explained it to a friend, is that "bastard" is closer
         | to "ol" and "dirty" than to "illegitimate". Because it appears
         | near those words more often.
        
         | James_Henry wrote:
         | It's because it's not based on a simple measure of the
         | similarity of meaning of the words. It's based on how often the
         | words are used next to each other, which means that since
         | celsius is used more often with the word temperature in the
         | corpus, it will be closer to the word temperature.
        
           | jaclaz wrote:
           | Try game #160 (25/02).
           | 
           | Input as guesses:
           | 
           | digit
           | 
           | number
           | 
           | car
           | 
           | compare
           | 
           | Once you got the solution, please explain to me how it works
           | again.
        
       | vorpalhex wrote:
       | This was fun! I wish it would give me two words as a hint, one in
       | the middle of the stack and one just a bit north of it. Something
       | to get me running.
        
       | Trombone12 wrote:
       | I find redactle and its clones to be better games than the
       | context ones because the similarity measures are inherently
       | without any sense, and so even if you guess the correct word it
       | often feels like pure luck.
       | 
       | 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".
        
       | NathanielBaking wrote:
       | I suspect like Wordle, or crosswords for that matter, it will
       | take a certain amount of practice to get the hang of it. But! 43
       | guesses and I feel good about it.
        
       | karesztrk wrote:
       | My best guess was Water too today. But Temperature as a solution
       | was a way far imo. Can you align the similarity index somehow?
       | Does it evolve? Is it GPT?
        
         | lucb1e wrote:
         | For non-historic games, it might be good to use
         | https://rot13.com to not spoil others
        
       | Zanni wrote:
       | Interesting. Took me way too long to realize that "close" is
       | measured semantically, not lexically. A good strategy is to go up
       | and down the ladder of abstraction, e.g. if "car" is close, try
       | "engine" and "vehicle."
        
         | nerdponx wrote:
         | The semantic similarity is not always sensible, either. The
         | underlying model needs some work.
         | 
         | (spoilers for today below)
         | 
         | .
         | 
         | .
         | 
         | .
         | 
         | .
         | 
         | .
         | 
         | .
         | 
         | .
         | 
         | 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
         | 
         | Ugh! I feel like I'm blindly stumbling around a maze of puns,
         | or a Saturday NY Times crossword full of eye-rolling clues. It
         | just feels like unsystematic guessing at what the semantic
         | similarity model might contain.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | jstummbillig wrote:
         | Since I had the same issue while looking at the app for a
         | minute, and your comment resolved it in 3 seconds, I would
         | argue the explanation could be better. Thanks.
         | 
         | Also: Interesting game!
        
       | nfgrep wrote:
       | Neat! Must just be compring the distance of embeddings?
        
       | lucb1e wrote:
       | What does the error "this word doesn't count" mean? Should the
       | word be countable? Is it known (because "I don't know this word"
       | also exists as an error) but not on the top N list?
        
         | lucideer wrote:
         | I also got "this word doesn't count because it's too common" as
         | well as the separate "this word doesn't count" - seem to have a
         | few different exclusion reasons, some of which don't have an
         | accompanying error detail.
        
         | myself248 wrote:
         | I've gotten that on words that might've been slurs or
         | something, but sometimes on words where I can't imagine that
         | being the case.
        
           | lucb1e wrote:
           | Oh, right I can see how that could be the reason for the word
           | I tried.
           | 
           | 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)
        
       | zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
       | I played contexto.me #168 and got it in 6 guesses.
       | 
       | 3 1 2
        
       | mmastrac wrote:
       | I find these to be less-than-ideal puzzles. For example, (no
       | spoilers) today's puzzle answer is an abstract concept X, and two
       | very common examples of X score both higher and lower (83 vs 7)
       | than words that are much further away IMO (29).
        
         | jasonjmcghee wrote:
         | Semantle (of which this appears to be a clone) uses cosine
         | similarity with word2vec from my understanding and it felt much
         | more intuitive.
        
         | eternalban wrote:
         | It's interesting that it works. (179->150->13->1 for me. [I
         | think it is more interesting to discuss paths instead of x and
         | neighbors. A graph plotting all successful paths so far would
         | be ++interesting to see. I wonder if a certain common final
         | sub-path (like above) occur. And which one is it?])
         | 
         | 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.
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | 1900-01-01 wrote:
       | When I select give up, I dont see an option to conrifm when it
       | asks me if I really want to.. im using my phone to play.
        
         | wardedVibe wrote:
         | Strange, I did get a confirm on my android on Firefox
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-05 23:00 UTC)