No mention of the Miele Dialog which gets as close as I've seen (though not quite there) to my dream of crispy fried eggs with runny yolk in the microwave. Their big example is being able to cook a fish while it remains in a block of ice. Pretty damn cool!
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.
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",
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).
Just on the redaction point, I did notice one email that looked correctly redacted but when zoomed in you could see some pixels from a few letters had escaped a little. It might be possible to reverse engineer the email just from that.
I had a very similar issue with Chants of Sennaar (another incredible game), where there were exactly 3 words I was missing, I knew what they were, but couldn't find them. I kept going anyway and found one (by a different method than usual), then eventually after scouring the whole map twice had to look it up and there was just a stairs down the edge of one section that I didn't see at all, but which also didn't respond to the "hint" button that normally shows you any direction you can go or thing you can interact with.
Also very glad I looked up the solution for the Obelisk puzzle in Fez as there was no way I was getting that (seemingly incredibly contrived, but apparently not correctly solved yet) solution.
An excellent 3 part video from Elyot Grant [0] introduced me to the term "fiero" for this conquering after a struggle, in contrast to a simple "aha/eureka". The difference being one is transmissible, the other is not. Thought it was a nice distinction. Highly recommend the videos!
Just Connections, Wordle, and Mini for me (in that order), with the occasional Crossword (tend towards a barbell strategy of just doing maybe Mon, Tue, Sun to get the quick hits and a real challenging puzzle).
Also experience the odd difficulty due to Americanisms, but can't really fault a puzzle coming from something called the New York Times for that. I do however think the puzzle setting for Connections is inferior to The Wall from Only Connect, where they got the idea from. If you haven't seen that yet it's definitely worth a watch (it gets harder as as a season progresses).
https://www.reviewed.com/ovens/features/we-tried-an-oven-tha...
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