Semantle This
My word game buddy showed me an interesting game, I’m late to. Semantle makes Wordle look stupid easy. I mean, Wordle is, but this game really shows it. To jump straight to the point, the main issue is that Semantle is just not fun.
Still, I need content, and this is a natural follow-up to my Bracket City advice. Plus, I’m eager to win in under 50 guesses. Can you imagine any other game where people might say, “Only 50 guesses? Nice!”
In Semantle, you simply guess random words and get an AI-generated score of how "semantically close" your guess is to the real word. As a non-linguist, this is a complex concept to understand, and I cannot express the logocentric coherency you seek. After talking to linguists, like my linguist ex-girlfriend (aka my wife), it turns out this is super-duper complicated.
The game even caused arguments in the linguistic community, because, really, how is "from" very close to "within"? And “from” is very far from "frame," which is spelled similarly? Pardon? Excuse me? A third way of saying what?
My ex-girlfriend/wife referred to it as "word class," not "semantics." Since I don't know what that means, I assumed she was being judgemental. I hit her back with the classic "you're word class" retort for when you've been outsmarted (bested?) and need to acknowledge it without conceding.
You're basically guessing how close a computer thinks two words are. There are negative scores, but they don't work how you'd expect. While a human might assume an antonym should get a negative score, your Al Gore Rhythm says ‘well… to be fair they're close.’ If the word is hot, cold doesn't get you -100, and might actually score, I don’t know, 97. But then lava might score much lower, like, I don’t know, 12, despite being something we strongly associate with heat. That's because hot and cold can appear in similar contexts, whereas lava isn't usually interchangeable with hot.
Again, I don't really get it. To be fair… nobody does. Just shout “AI!” like “Tada!” when you get the word after 100s of guesses.
For added confusion, they included two scoring systems and likely assume you'll ignore one. You get a similarity score that goes up to 100 and, as mentioned, can even be negative. Or you get a ranking based on the 1,000 closest words to your target word. Rank 1 is the closest, because only programmers seem to understand indexing from 0. And while rank 1,000 means you're barely in the club, it also means nothing. Most early guesses are like crossing off one word from the dictionary at a time.
Semantle was created by David Turner in January 2022, during the Wordle craze. Bla blah. Apparently, my coworkers played it in Hebrew, because an Israeli programmer, Itamar Shefi, later developed a Hebrew (סמנטעל). The Hebrew version uses a different database of words, drawn from Hebrew Wikipedia, rather than the English version's Google News dataset, and is more impossible to me than Hebrew Connections.
The arguably interesting part is how word similarity is calculated. Semantle uses Word2Vec, a model that determines relationships between words by analyzing the contexts in which they appear. Again, this means cat and dog might be close because they appear in similar sentences, but so might love and hate, despite being opposites. I’d put dog and love together, which only means I’m not compromised. The algo understands words different to the way people do. As many have said, AI doesn’t get horny, and that will be its downfall (do people say that?). AI understands which words keep each other company.
This is not a game of intuition. It is a game of seeing how close to an NLP you can think, or how much free time you have.
Somewhat unrelated image that makes me think about how annoying password creation + this game is.
PS I still have never listened to The Bechdel Cast, but only because I spend too much time on Two Old Queens.
Tips for Semantle Solvers:
Start broad. Try words from completely different categories, like animal, cut, and, it, and marvelous. Your first goal is to figure out roughly which area of meaning you're dealing with.
My mistake when starting was listing things I saw, like I was playing "I Spy." I was guessing tree, bus, construction, butt, sign, another butt, instead of simple words like with, from, and and. This is so0o0o not I Spy. It’s “Guess a word.”
Don't think in synonyms alone. Words that appear in similar contexts can score highly even when they have very different meanings. If doctor is close, try hospital, patient, nurse, or medicine, rather than just synonyms for doctor. You need to split the difference between results, because doctor scoring higher than hospital may indicate it's more of a human-signifying word than a building-signifying word. Or not. Again, who knows?
“Splitting the difference” is really the only way I can describe this game.
Try opposites. Since similarity is based on context rather than dictionary definitions, antonyms can be surprisingly close. Hot and cold may be neighbors, not opposites. Again, use the difference in scores to figure out your direction.
Only hot matters. Cold answers are basically useless. There’s basically no direction at the start when you’re getting below 12 on each guess, except to think of something completely different than the words thus far.
Don't trust the algo too much. Side note, the model learns from text, not human intuition. Sometimes two words that seem obviously related will score poorly, while something seemingly ridiculous will turn out to be extremely close. Overthink in the direction of “what have I not tried,” not in the direction of “how are these two close, but not these.”
Change your word class. Don't get stuck guessing only nouns. The answer could be a verb or an adjective. If education is close, try teach, learn, or academic. Word classes are a real linguistics concept, but don’t ask me to explain.
Use hints when you're truly stuck. Semantle is hard. I probabily will start with guesses until I learn how to play better.
Semantle requires considerably more patience than Wordle. It’s a game about not being human. But like any puzzle, it can be satisfying, especially to my fellow dorkuses.
Go give it a try. Maybe it will be less frustrating for you, and you can roast me in the comments.
