[HN Gopher] Mathematics of the daily word game Waffle
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       Mathematics of the daily word game Waffle
        
       Author : belter
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2025-01-17 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | ChrisArchitect wrote:
       | Is there a daily NYT word game called Waffle? I don't think so?
       | 
       | Wordle - NYT daily word game.
       | https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
       | 
       | Waffle - some other game. https://wafflegame.net/
        
         | ilikepi wrote:
         | Weird...the NYT is referenced only in the Introduction, and
         | never is it suggested that there is an affiliation between the
         | New York Times and the game Waffle or its creator. They really
         | only reference Wordle to note that Waffle has some very loose
         | similarities, like the fact that they both use letter tiles and
         | both use different colors to hint where those tiles go.
         | 
         | Makes me wonder if the title of the article was generated by an
         | LLM.
         | 
         | EDIT: add context; fix typo
        
           | dang wrote:
           | Hmm strange! Well, we've de-NYT'd the title above.
        
           | beardyw wrote:
           | And of course NYT only bought Wordle, so the likeness would
           | be to Wordle, nothing to do with NYT at all.
           | 
           | I like Waffle a lot, and thought about the best strategy for
           | creating the grids, which is probably just a lot of trial and
           | error.
        
         | russellbeattie wrote:
         | > _" This note explores some mathematics associated with the
         | word game Waffle, which has similar rules to Wordle."_
         | 
         | I was about to point out the same thing. The title should read
         | "NYT-like."
        
       | oliwary wrote:
       | Interesting! I think there is a lot of math going on in these
       | kind of games. I have noticed interesting patterns in my game
       | https://videopuzzle.org/ as well.
       | 
       | In daily mode, everyone gets a video scrambled into 4x4 pieces,
       | in the same way, and needs to unscramble it. The operations
       | available to unscramble a video are swapping a tile, and shifting
       | the entire board. The lowest score every day is usually 12-14,
       | but sometimes much lower.
       | 
       | Before I introduced the shifting function, surprisingly, every
       | puzzle could only be solved in an either even or odd number of
       | moves. Some days, all solutions would be 12-14-16 etc, while
       | other days only 13-15-17 were possible. The arrows have changed
       | this, as you can sometimes shave another move off if you use it
       | smartly.
        
         | wetmore wrote:
         | Google even and odd permutations to learn more :)
        
           | oliwary wrote:
           | Ahhh fascinating! :) Thank you for the pointer.
        
           | JadeNB wrote:
           | What a lovely independent discovery! The context is similar
           | to the (un)solvability of the 15 puzzle.
           | 
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_puzzle#Solvability
        
       | belter wrote:
       | https://wordwaffle.org/
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-17 23:00 UTC)