Thursday, April 19, 2012

4/19/2012

Welcome to the Guess My Word blog. This is a place to discuss the words of the day chosen by Joon and Mike. This paragraph is here mostly as spoiler space. Here are today's words:

mike's word: botulism
joon's word: ungainly

Discuss.

10 comments:

  1. Not exactly speedy, but I did get both words. Surprised to be first to hit the leaderboard--usually there are a lot of folks already on.

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  2. It's frustrating for me that it sometimes will take me a couple of minutes to come up with any words between my two closest guesses, when most others seem to have almost instant recall of every word between any two words in the dictionary. I spent about half my over 6 minutes on Joon's word on the last three guesses before I finally landed on the right one, and at this (admittedly early) point, I have taken about twice as long as anyone else.

    Then again, sometimes I'm lucky and get a word very quickly, as with Mike's word today. So maybe it all balances out in the end.

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    Replies
    1. lane, not everybody's brain is wired the same way. and in general, you're doing fine; only about 2/3 of solvers to attempt the word so far have landed on the right answer at all.

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    2. Joon, does that mean you have a way to count the people who abandon the game? That would be an interesting number to add to the bottom of the leaderboard (although it wouldn't be a perfect measure of defeat by the game).

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  3. i just had to check to see if anybody else guessed boustrophedon on mike's word. nope, so far just me.

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  4. Joon, I just signed in to tell you that if you put 'boustrophedon' in your queue, there could be serious consequences. Coal in your stocking, or perhaps brisk sales of little voodoo Joon dolls...?

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  5. Joon, have you (or has anyone else, for that matter) ever tabulated the long-term performance of the regulars? I know there's a lot of variability from day to day, but I also know that no matter what I do, Laura Dove will do in fewer tries. (To name just one.)

    I'd sort of like to know who the best solver is, even anecdotally. Any chance of that happening?

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    Replies
    1. i haven't, but this seems like the sort of thing that's at least semi-doable. bearing in mind:

      1. people don't show up on the leaderboard when they fail a word. this is a worse outcome than taking a long time/many guesses to get it right, but it would not lower your averages.
      2. some people often enter different names on the leaderboard as a form of commentary on the word.

      that's the sort of thing that makes it hard to keep long-term statistics. i could still whip up something approximate without too much difficulty. maybe i'll try it.

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    2. the top solver by # of guesses, among those who have played at least 100 times (of the 1000 or so game since GMW started), appears to be "nina's friend's daughter", averaging a robust 13.2 guesses. the speediest solver on average is "Stella" (stella zawistowski), averaging 1:19.5, just ahead of "David R", averaging 1:20.3.

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    3. I don't take this all that seriously, or rather, competitively. There are people who comment on the word or their performance on any given day, myself certainly included. ("Ric Q FAIL" means I clicked the "I give up" button and then used the browser's BACK button to type in the answer, solely for the purpose of acknowledging the fail.)

      And of course the time includes the unexpected phone call or interruption by a child.

      But just for giggles? Thanks for the info!

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