Comments on: Guess the five-letter word. GUESS IT

Guess the five-letter word. GUESS IT

tepidmonkey — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:07:55 -0800

Word Sandwich: The mystery five-letter word is somewhere between your "highest" guess alphabetically and your "lowest." It's essentially a lexical Guess the Number.

By: cortex

cortex — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:29:38 -0800

God, I remember this game. I hate it. It's a perfectly good diversion, mind you, but I hate it with every fiber of my being. My brain doesn't store this shit in a binary tree, you bastards. It hurts to do a quicksort on the fly.

By: Ambrosia Voyeur

Ambrosia Voyeur — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:38:09 -0800

That was fun for 8 minutes.

By: Ambrosia Voyeur

Ambrosia Voyeur — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:38:48 -0800

/me has done WAY too much filing in this life.

By: signal

signal — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:54:49 -0800

It's vocabulary is really, really limited.

By: arcticwoman

arcticwoman — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:28:24 -0800

This is WAY too hard for me. I'm a little embarrassed, really.

By: crossoverman

crossoverman — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:42:01 -0800

It's giving my brain a work out.

By: kcds

kcds — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 18:42:57 -0800

Big ups - I'm diggin' it

By: chara

chara — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:16:50 -0800

I don't understand what it means by "too high" alphabetically.... The word was 'melba' and I guessed 'apple' and it was still "too high". Am I missing something?

By: utsutsu

utsutsu — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:31:12 -0800

Higher = it comes before it alphabetically lower = it comes after

By: John of Michigan

John of Michigan — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:42:27 -0800

utsutsu: Thanks for the translation. That helped. A lot.

By: nelvana

nelvana — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:15:09 -0800

Thanks - this is fun!

By: InnocentBystander

InnocentBystander — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:12:27 -0800

Woot, I'm in the top five for the day!

By: dhartung

dhartung — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:29:13 -0800

It really likes "common" words as answers. Think broadly.

By: The Gooch

The Gooch — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:06:37 -0800

Well, I guess I've found my new crack. Why do the most obvious words disappear from my head the second I start a new game?

By: seanyboy

seanyboy — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:51:57 -0800

too hard.

By: darksasami

darksasami — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 02:26:39 -0800

I can't believe I ended up stuck between MATER and MATEY for so long...

By: goodnewsfortheinsane

goodnewsfortheinsane — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:41:45 -0800

Slightly off-topic: what does "lower down in the alphabet" signify to you - "more towards the end" or "more towards the start"? I've always found the earlier interpretation puzzling, but it might just be me.

By: cortex

cortex — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 06:52:55 -0800

Out of context, it means "more towards the start" for me. But how much of that is from direct exposure to ASCII et al I can't say; and the specific context might totally overrule that.

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:08:17 -0800

Hm. If I'm doing the math correctly, you should be able to do each one in 24 guesses or less. (26^5 <>I'm trying to avoid playing.

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:14:46 -0800

Bad html + html stripper = comment mostly lost. Attacking a randomly generated group of letters: 26^5 < 2^24. So, you could do it in 24 guesses. It would be a bit easier to do one letter at a time. 26 < 2^5, so worst case, 25 guesses total. They're English words, so there's letter distribution & other knowledge to bring to bear. But I'm desparately trying to avoid playing. I have work to do.

By: msali

msali — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:05:33 -0800

Blogs isn't a word? Bullshit! I call bullshit!

By: alexei

alexei — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:20:03 -0800

Apparently 'masty' is though...

By: alexei

alexei — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 00:23:53 -0800

Buncha comments and not one posted score? It really is hard. Mine was in the low 7000s.

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:45:07 -0800

OMG. I cracked that open last night. Um. Your guesses have to be words? You might like a list of five letter words. I'm not even going near this because I value my sanity.

By: cortex

cortex — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:21:33 -0800

You might like a list of five letter words. Next step: tree that list out and cheat like a bastard.

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:09:14 -0800

I keep going back & forth about the challenge of treeing it out (first six levels on a page would be easy, another couple of levels with a more complex layout), then debating if I'd be griefing, or just a cheating bastard. So, yeah, I'm still avoiding it. Though it is getting sorely tempting.

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:51:07 -0800

I cheated poorly. Okay, I registered myself in Cheatertown. I laid out the first six choices on a page. Then I hit that list in a spreadsheet, which was slower. My best of three placed in the top 100 due to a lucky one, though I usually scored 6k. I think I see a way to do a decent 8-choice layout... But that's enough for now.

By: ceiriog

ceiriog — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:32:32 -0800

I just had "thong" and "pants" in the same game.