A couple of game followups
November 20, 2023 at 12:20 PM by Dr. Drang
Here are some little tricks associated with Wordle and Conlextions, the Connections-like puzzle put out by Lex Friedman.
Last week, I mentioned that I needed a new starting guess for Wordle, and I wrote about how I used some simple command-line tools to see if the word I was considering was an appropriate choice. In a nutshell, I had been using IRATE as my first guess, but because it was the answer recently I wanted to try a new initial guess that might be the answer in the future. ALTER seemed like a good choice, but I wanted to make sure it hadn’t already been used. I had a list of all the answers in chronological order in a file named answers.txt, and the most recent answer was DWELT.
My solution involved three separate commands. All three involved grep and one included head in a pipeline. Reader Leon Cowle was unsatisfied with this and began casting about for a cleaner solution. Here’s the single command he came up with to replace the three I used:
egrep 'alter|dwelt' answers.txt
The output was
dwelt
alter
which told me that ALTER was an answer and that it would come after DWELT. This was everything I needed to know in one step. Beautiful!
You might argue that for a one-off like this, the solution that occurs to you first is the best because it takes the least amount of your time. Generally speaking, I agree with that, and I’m not unhappy with my three-command solution. But Leon has given me the best of both worlds. I got to have my own inefficient solution that I thought of quickly and I got to learn from his more elegant solution. Knowing which of two text strings appears first in a file is something I’m pretty sure I’ve had to do before and will have to do again. Now I have a simple and effective solution to pull out of my toolbox. Thanks, Leon!
As for Conlextions, I’ve been playing it for a few weeks and recommend it to anyone who likes the NY Times Connections game but is finding it a little too easy. I’ve been playing Connections since early summer and while it has gotten more difficult, the sense of accomplishment I get in solving it with no mistakes is wearing off. Conlextions is more diabolical and more satisfying when you solve it in four guesses.
I have only three gripes with Conlextions:
- I don’t think the t belongs in its name.
- Lex’s tendency to define groups as “words that begin with S,” or some other letter, is frustrating as hell because it’s both ridiculously easy and a connection I almost never see.
- The info that you share with others when you solve the puzzle includes the time it took. I’m a slow and methodical player, certain that Lex has laid so many traps that I need to think through all the possibilities three or four times before committing myself to any grouping. Including the time I spend is embarrassing, especially when I see the solution times of people like Dan Moren and Greg Pierce.
In protest of this prejudice against the excessively careful, I’ve recently taken to deleting the solve time from my posts on Mastodon. And to avoid the tedium of backspacing, I made this Shortcut that does the deleting for me:
It searches the clipboard for a linefeed, the word “Solve,” and all the text after that. It replaces that with the empty string and puts the updated text back onto the clipboard.
So now when I want to post my Conlextions result to Mastodon, I tap the “Share these results” button, press and hold the side button on my phone to activate Siri, and say “Delete Time.” The name of the Shortcut seems to be distinct enough that Siri hasn’t misinterpreted it yet.
I would not normally use Shortcuts for an automation like this. Keyboard Maestro would allow me to invoke it with a keystroke and could also do the pasting. But since I always play Conlextions on my phone, Shortcuts was the best option.
