[HN Gopher] A solver for Semantle
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       A solver for Semantle
        
       Author : evakhoury
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2026-02-18 19:25 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (victoriaritvo.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (victoriaritvo.com)
        
       | a_shovel wrote:
       | I was hoping this would have some application for human solving.
       | I gave up on Semantle because I couldn't figure out any sort of
       | strategy.
        
         | pokpokpok wrote:
         | it was mentioned above, but give it another chance using the
         | pimantle UI that provides a 2d map, much more enjoyable:
         | https://semantle.pimanrul.es/
        
       | jml7c5 wrote:
       | Regarding Semantle, I found that Pimantle
       | (https://semantle.pimanrul.es/) is a much more satisfying
       | implementation to actually play. It provides a 2D visualization
       | of guesses, which lets you see the clusters and lines of
       | similarity more clearly.
        
       | tptacek wrote:
       | This has Peter Norvig sudoku energy, in that it describes a game
       | that is tricky enough for humans to solve that it's become a
       | whole pastime, but is a trivial solver away from reliably
       | defeating, and with a tiny amount of code. Once you see what
       | they're doing with this, you're like, oh of course. Very cool.
        
       | OisinMoran wrote:
       | This is super interesting, thanks for sharing! I did a similar
       | thing a few years ago which I'd been meaning to properly finish
       | and share, and your post was the inspiration needed to make mine
       | public (albeit still in a state much too messy for my liking,
       | hopefully having it public will force me to improve it).
       | 
       | We took fairly different approaches, but I really enjoy the
       | visual explanation element of yours! Well done.
       | 
       | My investigation stemmed from wondering if the seemingly useless
       | 1st, 10th, and 1000th nearest word similarity scores were enough
       | to uniquely ID the word. Turns out--yes, pretty much! It's
       | effectively just a kind of reverse engineering, similar to how
       | you also made your own version of the game. Can definitely
       | improve on a lot.
       | 
       | Tried today's puzzle and got it in two (first was 999/1000).
       | 
       | Here's my code & write up: https://github.com/OisinMoran/Solving-
       | Semantle/blob/main/Sol...
        
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       (page generated 2026-02-18 23:00 UTC)