[HN Gopher] A solver for Semantle
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       A solver for Semantle
        
       Author : evakhoury
       Score  : 46 points
       Date   : 2026-02-18 19:25 UTC (3 days 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.
        
         | AgentCIPHR wrote:
         | Oooh I love this, thanks for sharing.
        
       | 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...
        
       | tantalor wrote:
       | Semantle is weird. Words you would expect to be close are not.
       | For example: castle is far from moat and stone. Why?
        
         | OisinMoran wrote:
         | I think the way the similarity is done is based on word co-
         | occurrence and the dataset used is news articles. So you can
         | imagine that not a lot of news articles mention castle in that
         | context.
        
           | tantalor wrote:
           | I guess I get really frustrated when the rules say you are
           | scored on "how close you are to the secret word, based on
           | your word's meaning" with very little explanation what that
           | means.
           | 
           | Then you have cases that drive me crazy, like the guess
           | "food" is very far from the secret word "cupcake", and "toy"
           | is actually very close to "cupcake". What?
           | 
           | Like, come on. This is not playable or fun.
           | 
           | For reference, these are the words close to "cupcake",
           | 
           | https://proximity.clevergoat.com/nearest/Y3VwY2FrZQ%3D%3D
        
       | keetal wrote:
       | For french speakers who want to play a similar game, there is
       | Cemantix (https://cemantix.certitudes.org/), also based on
       | Google's word2vec.
        
       | omoikane wrote:
       | There was a solver years ago that used a similar technique, where
       | you get similarity scores from three fixed words ("giant enemy
       | crab") and it finds the target word instantly:
       | 
       | https://github.com/manimino/semantle-crab
       | 
       | The solver website seems down, but the archived version still
       | works:
       | 
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20220421184123/https://crab.mani...
        
       | bscphil wrote:
       | I like this article a lot, but if I can put forward one mild
       | criticism, it seems to depend entirely on having _exactly_ the
       | same measure of semantic distance for word pairs as the original
       | generator. In that case, as the post shows, you only need several
       | guesses to eliminate all possibilities other than the correct
       | one, just like you only need a few GPS satellite locks to pin
       | down your location.
       | 
       | It would be interesting to see a solver that works more like a
       | human player, where it requires the "warmer" "colder" information
       | from different guesses to hone in, rather than being able to
       | simply look up which words have the _exact_ semantic distance (+
       | /- some fudge factor) from the guess.
        
       | pvillano wrote:
       | Great visualizations
        
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       (page generated 2026-02-21 23:01 UTC)