[HN Gopher] Solving Redactle with Decision Trees
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Solving Redactle with Decision Trees
Author : foobuzzHN
Score : 18 points
Date : 2024-09-02 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.valentin.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.valentin.sh)
| gjm11 wrote:
| This is fun!
|
| Of course a good Redactle player can do much better than what's
| described here, because this algorithm (by design) doesn't use
| any information about the article other than yes-or-no "does
| such-and-such a word appear in the article?", one bit per guess.
| But in fact there's a ton more information than that even before
| you start guessing words.
|
| If you have the full text of all the articles, as here, then of
| course solving is pretty trivial: just look for an article with
| the right pattern of word lengths. The game might be working with
| slightly older or newer versions than the ones in your database,
| but there are any number of ways to do the matching fuzzily.
|
| The sort of thing a good human solver might do is quite
| different. I pulled up a random Redactle game by way of example:
| https://redactle.net/en/Q160645 (note: redactle.net is the
| canonical place to play Redactle these days, and recommended in
| preference to the redactlegame.com referenced in the article).
| Here's the sort of thing you might notice _before guessing any
| words_ :
|
| - The article begins "An 9 is ...", so our subject begins with a
| vowel.
|
| - There's something weird in the structure of the first sentence.
| We've got "... 7 and 8 3, for 7 7, 6 be 5 for by ...". After
| staring at it for a bit, you might decide that the 6 is probably
| something like "should", and the 3 pretty much has to be "who".
| So "7 and 8" are probably two categories of person. You could
| pretty much solve the whole thing just by staring at this hard
| enough, but let's look elsewhere now.
|
| - Redactle players get used to spotting things that are likely to
| be numbers. In the first paragraph under the "8" heading we see:
| "... that for 5 1.1 6 that an 6 5 in the 11, they 6 behind 5 5 in
| 6 by 1 5". The 1.1 is obviously a number. "for 5 [number] [word]
| that ..." is probably "for every [number] [unit] that ...", and
| the "behind" a bit later means that it's probably a unit of
| _time_. Something like: for every 2.3 months that an 6 spent in
| the 11, they lagged behind other 5 in 6 by 2 weeks.
|
| - That smells like _child development_ , doesn't it? So maybe our
| subject is something like ... some sort of institution, like a
| juvenile detention centre, that it turns out to be bad for
| children to spend time in? Something like that.
|
| - So we should look at that first sentence again. Surely "7 and
| 8" must be "infants and children" or "parents and children". You
| might well guess the title at this point, but if inspiration
| doesn't strike:
|
| - A bit lower down we see "In 9 5 10 are 2 6 in use, ..." and
| that "2 6" might jump out at you as surely being "no longer". The
| 10 is surely the plural of our 9-letter subject. Ah, it must be:
| "In countries where [plural of title] are no longer in use". So
| this continues to sound like some sort of institution, something
| that many (more enlightened? richer?) countries have stopped
| using because they're a Bad Thing in some sense. (Perhaps because
| of the child-development thing conjectured above.)
|
| - 9 letters, beginning with a vowel. Outdated sort of institution
| children are put in, which turns out not to be good for their
| development. At this point, anyone good enough to have spotted
| the things I mentioned above will surely think of "orphanage",
| and now we can make sense of that thing in the first sentence:
| it's not _should_ , it's rather the opposite. "... infants and
| children who, for various reasons, cannot be cared for by their
| ..."
|
| - And now you can put the answer in, with pretty high confidence,
| without having guessed any other words at all.
|
| This way of playing isn't for everyone. It's much harder work,
| and takes longer, than throwing out guesses and seeing what turns
| up. But it's pretty satisfying when it works out.
| npinsker wrote:
| That's super fascinating, thanks for the comment. I had no idea
| you could go so far without a guess.
|
| Making use of the Wikipedia article text (and even the titles)
| seems mostly, but not entirely, against the spirit of the game;
| the technique used to solve it here is practically identical to
| vanilla Wordle. It'd be much harder to code, but ideally it
| would be able to approach the solution with some sort of walk
| through an embedding, like humans do.
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(page generated 2024-09-02 23:00 UTC)