Show HN: MidWord – A Word-Guessing Game
(midword.com)57 points by minaguib 6 days ago
57 points by minaguib 6 days ago
Very clever idea! It's difficult to come up with an original idea for a word game, but you seem to have done it. If there's one like this, I haven't seen it.
The only issue I noticed was there seems to be some lag on printing some of the results. Maybe memoizing some repetitive functions might help, if you're not already.
Nice work!
Bisection search the game, but honestly was fun to play with my partner multiple times.
A little presumptuous to say it is the world's "favorite" guessing game... But I had fun for a few words. It was nice you could press the enter key on mobile and keep the keyboard up.
Are you thinking of doing a daily word? Or just a random dictionary word each time you refresh?
I've always been a backend/systems kind of guy.
For the frontend for this I used Vue.JS as a learning experience. Overall it was straightforward and quite pleasant.
The hardest part was the mental process of giving up on server-side business logic enforcement (such as anti-cheating). At the end of the day ... "it's just a game" :)
Nice! Fun game.
Similar idea, different interface: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44189814
No it's intentional. The highlight is what I call a "known prefix"
It's a hint to tell you the word starts with "s", but since you didn't narrow it down to "su..." or "sv..." it's not giving you more hints.
Once you narrow it down further, say, "sub..." and "sun..." it'll highlight the known prefix "su"
There is a bug in the calculation of the known prefix.
Suppose the target word is before tin, but after timorous. Midword only displays "ti" for the known prefix. But it should display "tim" - there is no string that could start with "tin..." but sort before the string "tin".
(Another bug is that if you take a hint that would reveal the entire word, the site doesn't display what the word was.)
I have a decade's worth of guess statistics per word.
Unfortunately, I just converted it to a frontend-only app to eliminate hosting costs, so I have no good location to keep tracking these stats.
Theoretically, "Oxford English Dictionary estimates that there are around 171,476 words currently in use in the English language", the log2() of which is around 17.38 - I have no historical data for 'volatile'
That's basically what I did. Drilled down in a binary-search fashion, guessing "captive" in 18 tries. (Doing it programmatically would have been even faster, of course, but then what is the fun of that? The manual approach yielded a fairly optimal performance anyway.)
I got "Negociate" after like 20 tries, the spelling of which I've never seen. I ended up using the hints to figure it out. When I clicked on the link of the word it took me to a "No results found for negociate!" page on Dictionary.com. Pretty frustrating, might want to double check your word list.