Any score 20 or less on any main board puzzle is a good score. Nice one!
Other than a computer-assisted solver, I am uncertain how one can cheat. Solving the game under one IP address then playing again knowing the solution using another IP address would be one way. Do you have something else in mind?
@BuzzClik -- I agree but maybe there is some other way we haven't thought of. I haven't really researched it. In my case, I also don't use any dictionaries which is probably why I almost never get the high score 😂😂😂 I think I got it once before but I like the satisfaction of knowing that my brain still works, which at my age is not always a given.
Eric tells us that the main board doesn't use really obscure words, and I find I don't need to use a dictionary. On a rare occasion, I will need to check to see if a combination of letters which MUST fit into a given space is a word I don't know. ESSE comes to mind as one of the very few that required checking.
The extra games (5x4) are different beasts. Many of them have strange words.
Anyway, @50srocker, congrats on your score and your high-functioning brain. 😉
https://wordbox.game
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8 Nov 2024 A: 15 swaps
it still seems like only luck can bring me the doubles and that’s the only way into the high As. Anybody got any different theories?
Ok, today's puzzle had the words rump, anal, and porn in it. Seriously? I hope this isn't a trend.
@MrFixit I think the people who get the lowest scores are either cheat or are the kind of geniuses who can put the words together in their heads from just looking at the letters. I'm happy if I get 15 swaps, I usually get between 15 and 25 (30+ on a bad day).
https://wordbox.game
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12 Nov 2024 B: 14 swaps
Sweet
@MrFixit oops, sorry about the spoiler.
No 14s for me recently. So I’ll have to post this:
https://wordbox.game
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15 Nov 2024 A: 15 swaps
I’m playing word box about two out of every three days. Very fun game. What has crossed my mind is it’s a bit like hitting a baseball (or maybe a golf ball). Might seem off the wall but hear me out.
If you average one correct hit per turn up until the last, you’ll solve the puzzle in one less guess than the number of boxes (I.e. 23 for the main puzzle or 19 for the extras). If you look at the daily histograms of the scores, you will see that around 80% of the scores are to the right of this threshold. So, maybe being to the left of this line is like hitting.300+ (or being under par in golf). I’ve been pretty good at being at or under this line most attempts lately, but up until my 14, not really smashing it. Now I’m starting to think that think that most of what resulted in my 14 was how the letters were swapped. The randomness of the swaps to set up the play just happened to match how I decide what swaps to make. Similar to how I think my freecell successes are tied to deals that match how I think. In baseball, it’s hitters for pitchers. In golf, they use the term horses for courses.
...although I did just get a 24, better than average. Respect to the 17...
I play every day. Most days all 4 puzzles. How would you make it harder?
I find if there’s not a row/column with 3 letters it’s difficult to get started.
Fewer arrows, forcing one to put (imagining) the (partial, at least) grid together to a greater extent *before* any moves, thus also forcing one to recall all previous moves made so as to avoid redundancy.
Of course in such a game a few more Qs, everyday words, and such to aid grid creation would help.
It occurred to me after seeing F-E as letters five and six, thus an assumption of S-T-R as one two three (even though I erroneously thought STRAFE vice STRIFE).
Even when accounting for all the arrows in its current setup, filling in the grid is an enormous chore without first making some moves. Taking out arrows would eliminate logic and turn the task into a guessing game.
Obscuring arrows/hints would undermine the cool logical challenge of the game. But he could continue to shuffle the board until no row/columns showed more than 2 letters.
The way I go thru stuff is I look for the row/column with the most "in this word" letters and I look at the letter frequency of those letters. So a word showing that it contains TAE might actually be tougher to get going that a word with JG because so many words contain TAE. When I see a word with something like HEE I give it little higher ranking because that repeated letter show another place that letter can't be.
None of that helps me find the nefarious doubles. I mostly have to back into those. Although every once in a while I know where a word is going and can find a double on purpose.
What you allude to above is often a problem as you get M*ST but that 4th letter could be A, I, O, or U so you have to wait until you fill enough other stuff in to be able to figure out which way the wind is blowing.
Fun game.
It is a good game...I may merely have been foolishly considering the futility of trying to build a better mousetrap. I suspect it's what coders must strive for all the time, though.
FWIW, the first prototype of this game didn't have the arrows at all. That idea came a bit later.
And the first version of the arrows was a bit different: For a given letter in a given row (or column), the number of horizontal (or vertical) arrows was limited to the number of that letter in the solution word for that row (or column), assigned left to right.
This is better explained by example: Suppose a row contains 2 E's, but the solution word for that row only contains one E. In that original design, only the first E (from left to right) would contain the horizontal arrow.
This design had arrows that communicated more information, but it was harder to explain, so we simplified it and decided all letters in a given row (or column) were the same.
And yeah, it turned out to be a much better game with the arrows.
Nice! I got today's puzzle A in 15, only 1 above the best score! I've been doing ok lately but not great, so this is a nice change.
I had today's main board (6x4) figured out after two swaps, but I just couldn't snag any doubles. Ended up with 18.
Yesterday, had a 31 on the main puzzle but then 15 and 16 on the B and C games (good for 2nd spots on the histogram. Maybe concentration goes up after a bad (relatively) result.
today, much better on the main puzzle
hhhhttps://wordbox.game
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18 Nov 2024 : 18 swaps
good for first column so far.
I know that Eric has said that he uses NASPA Word List (the one used for
Scrabble tournaments in North America), but I seem to remember that
when I played scrabble regularly you could not use proper names,
abbreviations or acronyms. But it seems like all those things are now
part of this NASPA word list. I think that I saw MENSA a few weeks ago,
and "cred", not to mention PSST. I did see that didn't I? Yeah, I know
that language is continually evolving and that dictionaries describe
usage not proscribe. Except for the French, I think that they still
proscribe. Maybe more of those "words" get used because there's a limit
of 5 or 6 characters.
NWL does not contain proper names, abbreviations or acronyms unless they happen to also be a word.
At the end of the puzzle you can tap on "Words" to see the definitions, which give an indication of why somebody decided to include it on the list.
For example, MENSA is "the grinding surface of a tooth".
Yes, CRED means "credibility", which is slang, but apparently somebody decided it's a word now. Note that it is not a proper name, abbreviation, or acronym.
PSST is a legitimate interjection. It just happens to have no vowels.
New PR
https://wordbox.game
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20 Nov 2024 C: 13 swaps
Mostly luck on the doubles.
That's the kind of score where your bar (13) has a gap between it and the next best score (15). Is that the case here, Denny?
13 is rare air.
No gap but I might be the only person who got a 13. I got very lucky. Every time I was just moving one letter into position it said "Double".
Occasionally the puzzles have more than one solution but the only one that counts is the one that wordbox generated
Grid C was tricky today but I think I just got kinda lucky. My impression is sometimes there’s not enough info to get going and you have to make educated guesses. Whatchu think?
@cellmate
(ignoring the arrow clues)
More than one possible word for a given row or column? Sure.
More than one solution for the whole puzzle? Super unlikely.
"you have to make educated guesses"
Yes. Some puzzles provide more info through the arrows than others. I find it interesting sometimes to think about the fact that the puzzle can be solved with just the arrows, with no knowledge of vocabulary, albeit with an unimpressive score. Like if I were doing the puzzle in some other language that I don't speak.
Using my knowledge of English is what allows me to make those educated guesses that raise the probability. Sometimes it's as simple as knowing that an S is a bit more likely to appear at the end of the word.
My work-in-progress automated solver tries to use vocabulary knowledge. For example, when it knows that a given letter can appear in one of 3 places, it calculates the likelihood using all possible words. Sometimes it can realize that one of the places is impossible or significantly more or less likely.
Wordbox solving has a lot in common with solving cryptograms.
So it's a combination of knowledge about English word formation (like Eric says common last letters, unusual letter combos or diphthongs), letter frequency, and then just general assessment of how wordbox chooses words.
I'm not sure how you (Eric) do it but it seems like you usually tend towards more common words as opposed to those oddball crossword puzzle words. I know you've described before how you try to pick more common words for the main grid but the subgrids also seem to lean towards more common words too. I really like the mix of words tho as usually I can guess them, rarely are they stuff like 'milt'
milt
n 1: fish sperm or sperm-filled reproductive gland; having a
creamy texture [syn: {milt}, {soft roe}]
2: seminal fluid produced by male fishAlthough I'm anxious to use that one in conversation.
MrFixit
Not sure this has been covered but is it "cheating" to write down letters on a piece of paper as you go?
Don't think so, jimmyp.
No doubt, writing things down will slow you down but will probably improve your score. So, it's whether you value speed or low scores.
I need to start doing that. I move an R into position and swear I'll remember that R was signaling it was in the old row. But then 3 moves later I might remember there was something special about it but I can't remember what.
I'll bet there's this monkey somewhere that can get better scores than some of the high ones I've seen.
"More than one solution for the whole puzzle? Super unlikely."
not so sure... 2 solutions for the main puzzle on the 23rd. And multiple solutions for _all_ of the others on the 23rd and since
20, but that one seemed ripe for a seven or eighteen...
Sorry for the outage this morning. It's fixed now.
https://wordbox.game
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5 Dec 2024 C: 14 swaps
Seems like there are a few of us still playing wordbox regularly. Dr.Bombay, you still at it? BrewCrew is, cellmate, BuzzClik, FC. Who else?
(Btw link up top of page)
One thing that has improved my game is to start by swapping a letter that does not belong in a RowColumn (RC) with another letter that does not belong in its current RC. But the improvement was only slightly better than 60%
I agree that removing the arrows turns it into a guessing game. They DO use obscure words, so there's no way to guess which letter combos are real words when some of the words are from specific regional dialects that may or may not be antiquated. The helpfulness of the arrows depends on the letter frequency - if there's a ton of e's or s's, it's a lot easier than when there's a more varied selection of letters. The game seems balanced, the score graph shows the majority of people getting decent scores within the first half of the graph, with a spread of higher scores trailing out from that.
Hey MrFixIt, I wrote a solver for cryptograms in a subset of the REXX language (KEX) about 30 years ago. I had a full text OSPD3 (Official Scrabble Players Dictionary), and made a custom string describing each word, generally just the duplicates so "1:4" indicates the first and fourth letter are the same so it could be something like "that" or "high". After auto solving a few, I created a non-autosolve mode just to not have to write in the newspaper. (Before I wrote the program, I'd actually gotten to the point where I could solve without writing in the paper - my wife had been doing these first so leave the paper version for her)
It didn't do much with letter frequency, though I did also generate a table of frequently adjacent or frequently start or end of word letters but never incorporated it into my solver.
Having written this was one reason I began work on a word box solver, but having "homie" in a word box -- well wasn't in the OSPD3 so no chance of solving. And another a day or so later, so I said: Nah, just doing them by hand.
So there's a significant difference in not having any template for possible WB words like there is in a cryptograms.
I play most days, staying on the left side of the curve generally always.
Thanks, Eric! It's fun and interesting. I find I Pat more attention to letter frequency locations like words start and end with S, end with E and D and R, rather than try to figure out whole words, I particularly forget about vertical words.
spruce, NASPA 2023 is current, but you can google nwl2020.txt to find a older version of the word list.
[update] it contains words and definitions
there's another, nwl23.txt, which contains the 2023 words only
or more legitly... get from www.scrabbleplayers.org (need to be a member $$)