Binary Wordle

262 pointsposted 6 months ago
by eh8

139 Comments

AmsterErdo

6 months ago

I think I don't get it... since it's binary, it can always be guessed in two attempts?

awwaiid

6 months ago

Yes. You can still try to get it in one attempt.

brookst

6 months ago

Odds in one attempt: 1 in 32

Odds in two attempts: 1 in 1

dskloet

6 months ago

Your odds add up to more than 1.

pteetor

6 months ago

Probabilities sum to 1.0. Odds don't sum.

tonmoy

6 months ago

Odds of getting it within 2 attempts is 1. Odds of getting it on exactly the second attempt is 31/32

xandrius

6 months ago

Ooops:

You won!

You guessed 01111 in 4 attempts!

brookst

6 months ago

Well yeah and a fair coin has P(heads) == P(tails) == 0 for someone who eats it.

user

6 months ago

[deleted]

sashank_1509

6 months ago

I’m glad I figured that out after my first attempt. I feel smart lol.

tylerchr

6 months ago

My wife took one look at this and said “It’s not Wordle if it’s all binary—it’s Digitle.”

HPsquared

6 months ago

Reminds me of the idea of analogue cheese - fake cheese. It's analogue cheese until you get some on your fingers, when it becomes digital cheese.

umvi

6 months ago

Binary is too easy, but hex can be tricky. I made a hex-based wordle puzzle for my programming game where you have to guess an 8-digit hex string in as few as 6-12 guesses using wordle mechanics... called the level "dwordle" :)

(video from like 3 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity2D/comments/sq4anb/i_added_a_w...)

charly187

6 months ago

Someone should make a base-26 version! It would probably be super popular!

patrakov

6 months ago

Step 1: Guess 00000.

Step 2: Replace all grey cells with 1s.

0xAFFFF

6 months ago

This is obviously improper. The valid strategy for this game unfolds as follows.

Step 1: Guess 11111.

Step 2: Replace all grey cells with 0s.

Thank you for your careful consideration.

nmeofthestate

6 months ago

If you start with 0's you save a small amount of electricity. 1's use up more electricity - any electronic engineer will agree.

justsid

6 months ago

Not to ruin a joke, but does it actually make a difference for SRAM? It’s two inverters in a loop, despite not being the same size they are active components. But I’m also a software guy so I could be totally wrong.

dskloet

6 months ago

I think displaying black or white pixels makes a bigger difference.

bdcs

6 months ago

> does it actually make a difference for SRAM?

I have no idea in practice. But for the thermodynamic limit of actually making a difference, any irreversible change requires heat to be generated, e.g. initializing to zero, truncating, or bitshifts with discarded information. In contrast, addition/subtraction/multiplication/bitshifts without over-/under- flow will not necessarily generate heat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

PS. you can also use mass-energy equivalence to extend this to calculate the lower limit of mass for a given quantity of information. TL;DR: The internet weighs 50g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaUzu-iksi8

heckelson

6 months ago

And for a second, I was proud that I solved mine in 3 steps...

user

6 months ago

[deleted]

paxys

6 months ago

Step 1: Guess anything

Step 2: Flip all the non green cells.

underlines

6 months ago

afaik, guessing anything not 00000 or 11111 at first step will lead to an optimum strategy of 3 steps. because you introduce possible "right digit at wrong place" as a third state.

guessing 00000 or 11111 removes that third state and leaves you with simple substitution of wrong cells, which leads to an optimal 2 step strategy.

but obviously the shortest strategy is just guessing it right on the first try :D lol

paxys

6 months ago

It doesn't matter.

Right digit at the wrong place = wrong digit = you should flip it.

This puzzle won't take more than 2 guesses no matter what you input the first time.

Jtsummers

6 months ago

It's still two steps. You only ever need to flip wrong digits.

jesse__

6 months ago

I think it's actually possible to win on the second guess with any initial input. Or at least I did it a handful of times..

vikingerik

6 months ago

This should be correct. For any cell that isn't green after your first guess, there's only one other possibility for its value.

dskloet

6 months ago

It's not guaranteed you will always win in 2 steps because occasionally you will win in 1 step.

Supermancho

6 months ago

Isn't 1 within the bounds of 2?

Sohcahtoa82

6 months ago

There's a difference between "in 2 steps" and "within 2 steps".

Supermancho

6 months ago

Splitting hairs seems like grammar policing. I can even see action 1 and null action if I squint hard enough.

selcuka

6 months ago

Yes. Yellow and grey mean exactly the same thing in this game: Flip it.

IAmBroom

6 months ago

Hoping that you are being sarcastic...

petra303

6 months ago

Yea, you don’t need more than two chances.

bbassett

6 months ago

and now we know how raid parity works

topato

6 months ago

This is some how the most concise description of parity ever

Sesse__

6 months ago

I intended this strategy, but 00000 happened to be correct, so I didn't even need a step 2.

arjvik

6 months ago

Came here to present my strategy for solving it in two tries, and realized it was far more complicated! (started with 00011)

abotsis

6 months ago

Yea, it’s too easy. Maybe if it were a “guess the number” but in binary? Hints are just “too high” or “too low”?

…though now that I’m playing it in my head that’s too easy too. (Start at MSB and shift right if too high and add bits if too low)…

Maybe if you reduced the number of guesses to 5 that’d add enough chance to make it fun?

TheDong

6 months ago

It's not supposed to be fun or hard, it's supposed to be funny. It's absurdist humor.

zck

6 months ago

I also made some number-based wordle-variants, which I call "numberdle". I found that it was hard to come up with good ways of guessing because wordle has the restriction that most combinations are invalid. You won't ever have to guess xwqqf, because that's not an English word. And more importantly, guessing some letters gives you information about the other letters. If you find out three letters, and have the target as _a_ts, you can use that to figure out the other two letters.

But if you need to guess a number, and you know it's _5_34, having three correct digits don't help you figure it out.

So I made some variants where guessed values do help you figure out the correct answer.

In rationerdle (https://zck.org/numberdle/?variant=rationerdle), you have to guess a rational number x/y, where both x and y are between 1 and 99, inclusive. It displays the rational number you actually guessed, and whether x and y separately are too high or too low.

In factordle (https://zck.org/numberdle/?variant=factordle), the player has to guess the factors of a target number.

In formuladle (https://zck.org/numberdle/?variant=formuladle), there is a graphed straight line, and the player has to guess the mx+b formula that graphs that line.

I would like to make more, but didn't have any other great ideas when I ran out of interest.

James-Livesey

6 months ago

If anyone's in need of a hexadecimal version... https://jamesl.me/hexle/

I similarly made a binary one before this version, but unsurprisingly, a lot of people said they found it too easy!

charlie-83

6 months ago

The hint actually makes it harder since I was required to guess a 0 and a F each time

mulmen

6 months ago

Got it in 10.

Black616Angel

6 months ago

I was a bit sad, when it didn't display my number of tries as a 10.

mccolin

6 months ago

There’s 10 types of people in this world: those that get that joke and those that don’t.

makerofthings

6 months ago

There are 2 kinds of people in this world, those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.

taneq

6 months ago

And fence post errors.

rodnim

6 months ago

And those who know this joke is actually in base 3. :)

NotAnOtter

6 months ago

This delivers on the title but I wonder if you could tweak it to make it an actual game without wildly overcomplicating it.

Maybe make the string much longer, like 10 bits, and the game only matches on substrings longer than 3. 000...000 would generally return no matches.

That's still probably solvable with superpermutations but wordle is "solvable" with a dictionary, so don't let perfect be the enemy of "better than 2 guess bordle"

thehours

6 months ago

Feedback: I'm unable to input with keyboard after typing anything but '0' until a full refresh (and selecting the input area with mouse).

Jtsummers

6 months ago

You may not need the refresh, with Safari I have to select the game board again after focus is moved by clicking "play again".

lazerman

6 months ago

The number of guesses should be written in binary too!

bitwrangler

6 months ago

I like the UI and cute idea, nice animation. great way to learn xor $FF haha.

nickburlett

6 months ago

Feature request: a "share" button, à la base-26 Wordle.

dhsysusbsjsi

6 months ago

I guessed 00000 and won first go!

thinkingemote

6 months ago

hmm. I guessed something different (010001 maybe, I cant remember) and won first go too. I looked in the comments hoping to find the joke. I guess I'm 1 of the 10 people who don't understand binary jokes.

cnity

6 months ago

Good one! I'm the other of the 10.

user

6 months ago

[deleted]

Bimos

6 months ago

Same here.

soneca

6 months ago

I guessed my first game in the first attempt! (10011)

drooopy

6 months ago

Guessed my first game in 2 attempts.

teekert

6 months ago

What are the odds!

soneca

6 months ago

3.125% I believe :)

user

6 months ago

[deleted]

user

6 months ago

[deleted]

kylec

6 months ago

Got it in one on my second game! Felt pretty good till I realized that's like 1/32 chance.

selcuka

6 months ago

The probability of getting it right at least once in your first 2 attempts is even higher (6.15%).

bentt

6 months ago

If this kind of troll app is what we can expect from our vibe coded future, then I'm all for it.

HenryBemis

6 months ago

So....

1st line, all zeros. It shows me where the zeros are.

Well.. that's it. Any non-zero is a 1.

So.. finished on the second line.

Am I the only one?

morcus

6 months ago

Yeah, it's definitely meant to be a joke.

You also don't need to start with all zeros, any input will allow you to finish on the second try.

IAmBroom

6 months ago

That didn't get it?

No, sadly.

citizenfishy

6 months ago

Isn't this just Mastermind?

maaaaattttt

6 months ago

Apologies for opening a tangeant on a tangeant, but am I the only one who thinks there are 2 levels of playing master mind (and therefore wordle)? Easy level, you let the player know exactly which spots are correctly placed and which ones are there but incorrectly placed. Hard level, you let the player know only that some are correctly placed and some are there but incorrectly placed without identifiying which ones. I personnaly don't enjoy the easy level when playing mastermind, but I do enjoy the hard version which is much more investigative and in my opinion triggers the same brain process as when I'm debugging code.

madcaptenor

6 months ago

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Wordle implemented in what you call “hard level”. But there’s no reason it couldn’t be.

zaik

6 months ago

No, this is much simpler.

jansan

6 months ago

More like Minionmind.

seabass

6 months ago

I love that not only are the inputs binary, but so are the results.

sarmadgulzar

6 months ago

So, this can be solved in at least one and at most two attempts.

kcaseg

6 months ago

Bit masking : the game

drdec

6 months ago

With this game, there is no try. There is do or do not.

celticninja

6 months ago

Isn't it always possible to get this on guess 2?

sidcool

6 months ago

It should be solvable in no more than 2 moves.

UnreachableCode

6 months ago

Don’t you mean 10 moves?

amanverasia

6 months ago

The only reason I logged into my account is to give you an upvote!

itishappy

6 months ago

Is it possible to get yellow cells?

Jtsummers

6 months ago

Use a mix of 0s and 1s, if the answer is "00110" and you put in "11000" you'll have 4 yellow and 1 green. If you use only 0s or only 1s for your first guess, you'll just get green and grey, no yellow.

itishappy

6 months ago

Huh, surprisingly difficult to get. Took me 8 or so attempts.

user

6 months ago

[deleted]

alloysmila

6 months ago

only two attempts are ever needed :-(

nicwolff

6 months ago

I, uh, got it in two. Is it creepy that the answer is my ZIP code?

user

6 months ago

[deleted]

odo1242

6 months ago

I somehow got lucky and guessed the answer in just one try lol

rossant

6 months ago

How lucky of you. You had one chance out of 100000.

user

6 months ago

[deleted]