I made a solver for this and did some comparison with Wordle: https://jacobbrazeal.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/solving-nerdle.... TL;DR even though there's an order of magnitude more possible words, you can solve it in fewer average guesses than Wordle pretty consistently.
That's because there are fewer letters. In wordle, ignoring the fact that the word need to exists, you could make 5 guesses with 5 new letters each time and still not quite exhausting the letter space. With the math one, in two guesses you can figure out the digits.
Also, I play wordle in the hardest mode, which forces you to always reuse known letters, which makes it a lot harder. (I also playu in a clone with an extended vocabulary here: https://www.arachnoid.com/wordgame/index.html)
You note that the interface accepts a lot more words than are in the dictionary, much like the normal Wordle game. I wonder if you can exploit the full set of acceptable words to narrow down the possibility space even further? I would not be surprised if there's an equation in the full set that performs better than the equation you initially selected.
It’s definitely possible. An exhaustive search would require tapping into the cloud since there are well over 100,000 words that the interface could use, times 17,000 target words, times the grading operation which is moderately expensive. My guess, though, is that the best starter word is number-dense since numbers show up in the middle of the frequency range, and therefore probably wouldn’t change. However, subsequent guesses would very likely benefit from the broader dictionary.
I get the same feeling as everyone. There is no point in the game because even a single digit wrong is no clue at all. In my 1st and only attempt, I entered 1 + 2+ 8 = 11 and both pluses, the 2 the 1 and the 8 were right, with only the 2 in the wrong position. And yet that gave zero clue to what the other number was... and it turned out to be another 8, which made finding the solution really luck-based.
As others have said, you can (and often should) make guesses that don't satisfy all the clues you've found so far. That way you can find / eliminate symbols much more quickly.
It's funny there are so many people saying how much they hate it. All power to you. But personally I like it way more than Wordle.
I basically like the solving part of Wordle but hate the thinking up words aspect. Nerdle fixes that, but the equation bit keeps it more interesting than a meaningless string of symbols.
Similar to how I prefer the numbers round on Countdown [1] to the main letters game.
I prefer the numbers round in Countdown as well, but much (much, much) prefer Wordle to Nerdle. Nerdle is an attempt to make a Wordle for numbers, but to me it just doesn't work. Today I quickly got 2+?+8=1?. Clearly ? can be any digit from 0 to 9. I had four tries left so a 40% chance of winning with no skill involved (I lost incidentally).
That situation is exactly what my first paragraph was about.
> As others have said, you can (and often should) make guesses that don't satisfy all the clues you've found so far. That way you can find / eliminate symbols much more quickly.
Just fyi, that paragraph is clear and unambiguous. Ironic that billforsternz chose to post his concerns in response to a comment which had addressed them.
Yes it could unfortunately. The solution repeated a number, making it almost impossible to guarantee a correct answer even if you had the majority down fairly early.
? As in Worldle itself (except in hard mode), you don't need to match what you've deduced already . So, your second line could have been some equation with (most of) the digits 3,4,5,7,9 (and whatever you need to make it an equation). The colour of those then would have told you all you need to know to win.
Worldle hard mode is solvable but it requires being very careful, and basically never typing in certain words.
For example: bills,dills,fills,gills,hills,kills,mills,pills,sills,tills,wills
If the answer is any of these words and you guess the wrong words once, you are unable to guarantee a win (outside of hard mode you could try guessing words to eliminate many letters at once)
I find that constraint to be roughly, if not more, frustrating than commutativity (which doesn’t even apply to subtraction or division!)
that is so odd - I think I had the same situation as well. I'm not particularly numeric so I was briefly excited (I tried an available number and realized it fit!) but then figured out that there were multiple solution.
And finally lost because I too didn't realize that I could re-use an 8. I'd feel bad but it could have been any of the choices I did take so ... maybe not so fun.
Yeah, and as with Wordle, I think there is some strategy that can be employed in the first couple guesses to aggressively eliminate digits and operators. Currently I use 3 * 5 + 2 = 17 as my first guess in order to try all the prime digits, 1, and the "easier" operators. There are probably better options though...
Interesting. I like "sum of two double digit numbers = double digit number." In Wordle I usually hunt for vowels, which I guess the equivalent thing here would be hunting for operators. But somehow it feels like knocking out digits is more useful here -- I guess because of the increased chance of repetition.
It is the same thing as with Wordle, when there is only one letter missing and you have to iterate over the possibilities. In words, however, typically there are only 2-3 correct choices.
Knowing the answer I then opened a new tab to try something [that I won't detail to minimize spoilers for today's puzzle] and got linked to
> >Number ordering and 'commutativity'
>
> We get it. 1+2 and 2+1 are effectively the same in maths because of a principle called ‘commutativity’. In the same way, 34 = 43.
>
> However in Nerdle, the only perfectly correct answer is the one we're looking for, in the order we have it. So if our answer contains 1+2, we won’t accept 2+1.
>
> We've spent hours playing with alternative commutative-friendly rules that would allow both 1+2 and 2+1. But so far, every variant we’ve tried is simply not as fun to play.
>
> If you feel the commutativity challenge costs you an extra attempt at a Nerdle challenge unfairly, you can always delete one line from your game emojis before you share them. We won’t tell anyone, promise.
The same issue afflicts mathle http://mathlegame.com/ and I think poses a fundamental issue with this game. In spelling there is a definite order. With commutative mathematical operations, not so. WRODLE!=WORDLE but 1+2+3==2+3+1. They might LOOK like different sentences, but they are not. They are the same. Sure, the glyphs are in different orders, but no aspect of the Platonic sum can distinguish them. They are one.
RAISE and ARISE both mean 'the lift up', but they're different words, and you're not going to win a wordle for 'ARISE' with 'RAISE'.
I'm not sure how you would want to win for getting the right number in the wrong place in a game which provides clues to find the right places by telling you when you have the right numbers in the wrong places.
Re RAISE and ARISE: they are not pointers to the same place in wordspace in the same way that 1+2+3 and 2+3+1 are in sumspace.
Re your second point: I love wordle. I'd love a game with similar game play that obeyed mathematical principles. It seems that nobody has found the right set of rules yet! That's why I've been trying these once and stopping. I don't find their rules beautiful in the same way that I do wordle's.
We could be extremely, reductively classical about it and say that all of Nerdle's answers point to the same place (⊤, since any answer equivalent to ⊥ is disallowed by the rules), but the real answer is that Nerdle—like Wordle—is simply about finding the right piece of syntax, not finding the right semantics.
What frustrated me was the guessing.
By equation 3 I had everything narrowed down except the 1s place in the answer which was same as number in the equation. So, I spent the next 3 guesses trying the remaining digits, and eventually losing with 2 more digits left to try.
What do you mean by incorrect? The equation has to be valid, according to the rules. At some point I ended up with 2 + <x> + 8 = 1<y> where x = y because of math. I had 5 guesses left and 8 possibilities. That's just gambling without the money at that point.
Sometimes it's what you need to do. If you know _IGHT, guessing the solution is not the best strategy since you get so little information each turn. You're much better off with FILMS or BLOWN, even if you know they can't be the solution.
Hard mode in Wordle precludes that option; after weeks in that mode in Wordle it would never occur to me to put an entirely bogus set of numbers into this.
I haven't played hard mode, but i imagine part of an optimal strategy is trying not to paint yourself into a corner like that.
Just the other day, i had SHA_E and knew there were more possible solutions than i had turns left. I guessed MILKY to try 3 possibilities at once.
I use that same strategy in Wordle. Most often my first word is SOARE and the second is MINTY… unless I got like three matches in the first word, it’s better to get extra data quickly.
It's all fun until you get something like FIGHT where the last four letters are right and have to just guess from LIGHT, MIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT, WIGHT, anything I might have missed, and there's no way to use any strategy and you just have to randomly guess and hope you guess right.
I can see that happening, although for some reason it hardly ever does with my usual guess strategies. I've only had one word result in a few candidates. The fact that it happened immediately and almost unavoidably in the nerdle made me think this really wasn't for me.
This situation is technically possible, but I'd be surprised to already have 4/5 letters, and not have already tested R, S, L, or N (N from NIGHT). There are all one point scrabble letters after all. I could see myself needing to roll the dice on MIGHT, TIGHT, WIGHT.
You can guess WARMS, which will either give you the answer (to input on the next try) or eliminate 4 of the possibilities, leaving only 2 to guess.
That's a best case of 2 additional guesses and worst case of 3 (expectation of 2 1/3) which is better than your strategy, which has a best case of 1, worst case 6, expectation 3 1/2.
Then you try to use those 8 possibilities (if not all) in the next round to eliminate some or most of them to quickly narrow down the scope of guessing
I liked it but I don’t like the 1+2 != 2+1 ; I understand why it is but that is just annoying throwing away one go that you cannot really know. Which is different from Wordle, game play wise.
Thank you for preformatting :P Mathler seems a little less chaotic. I think I could actually enjoy nerdle if it had some limitation on one of the many variables to account for. Mathler seems to do exactly that
Yeah after I wrote that I realized that on this one you have to solve for both the left and right size of the equation, whereas mathler tells you right right side. I think I prefer mathler for this reason.
There are two words. You only get to make one guess at a time, and it shows you the results for both words. The goal is to guess both words in seven guesses.
ahh, nice :-) I got the word today but didn't actually know it was a word or what it meant. However, I'm enjoying the challenge and the chance to practice thinking through 5-letter words in Spanish
I played it for a while but found myself constantly opening my calculator or counting on my fingers. I failed at 4th grade times tables lol. I could solve it every time, between 4 and 6 tries, but it was just annoying to have to deal with stuff like that, and that it requires specific numbers in spaces...not expressions with the same numbers that evaluate the same e.g. 48/8+3=9 != 3+48/8=9.
This game type works so much better with word, at least with my brain.
This is fun but the different colors (or rather, lack of color) are way too subtle for me. It takes me conscious effort to distinguish "correct-character-wrong-position" from "correct-character-correct-position".
It probably also doesn't help that I'm seeing also seeing tons of phantom dots from the grid illusion [0]...
I solved it in six using only three unique digits and one unique operator (excluding the required equals of course). I expected it to be more varied and grew more despondent as all of the digits and operators dropped away. Even with the restricted character set I'd expect the operators could produce some varied gameplay, but from the one puzzle I got I'm not too hopeful. Are these hand-designed, or random for each person?
If it's like wordle, then everyone gets the same puzzle on a given day. Your description matches what I played today (and is a partial spoiler; one great thing about wordle is that people have been good about not spoiling it). Tomorrow's may be quite different.
Upon solving, I got a popup saying the next puzzle would be available exactly six hours from then. I suspected that meant that puzzles would be released to me on my schedule, and may or may not be unique.
Perfect example of why this doesn’t really work. I didn’t have enough information to narrow down the possible values that could solve the missing parts of the equation I stumbled on in the remaining tries.
Once you have the basic shape you make a guess where you collect as much information as possible. This was my attempt at the same equation https://imgur.com/a/7qGUC6k
I somehow managed to get the right-hand side of the equation correct on the first try, which made finding the left-hand side fairly easy. I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow to try the game out for real.
Is the UI really slow to react for anybody else? Button clicks have a noticeable lag for me on Safari on iOS. I get the same thing on some other Wordle clones and archives, but not the main Wordle site.
Seems the strategy is to eliminate as many numbers/operators before you attempt to guess. Was able to get it in 4 as by the second row I had the set of values to work with.
Did you make any guesses that couldn't possibly be correct given previous feedback? I made one by accident. facepalm
On https://jamesl.me/hexle/ I made a guess that couldn't possibly be correct on purpose so that I could guess more digits. I've done the same with wordle. It's probably the least useful w/ Nerdle because it's just 9 digits.
