
I spent way too much effort to win a game show on Dutch national TV - Vinnl
https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow/
======
Vinnl
A shorter version with pictures is available in this Twitter thread:
[https://twitter.com/VincentTunru/status/1205527364739981312](https://twitter.com/VincentTunru/status/1205527364739981312)

Feel free to ask me anything!

 _Edit:_ Ah, and for Dutch people, the first actual episode can be viewed
here:
[https://www.sbs6.nl/programmas/lingo/videos/Vk9EpXSlwas/ling...](https://www.sbs6.nl/programmas/lingo/videos/Vk9EpXSlwas/lingo/)

~~~
mettamage
It always trips me up how ij is one letter in Dutch since I learned Dutch
spelling with ij and not the y version. The y version was the normal Greek
one.

For non-Dutchies: y = y and y = ij, they both have different sounds.

~~~
bouke
Even though ij often fills a single square in puzzle, it is not a character in
the Dutch alphabet. It is sometimes incorrectly assumed to be in place of y (y
is only used for foreign words). It is a combination of i and j, but has
special uppercasing rules in that they are uppercased together; e.g. IJzer
(iron). There's even a Unicode codepoint assigned as well: ĳ (U+0133 LATIN
SMALL LIGATURE IJ), although its use is discouraged.

See also:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_\(digraph\))
and
[https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraaf)](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_\(digraaf\)).

~~~
mcv
Some people are really inconsistent about this, insisting it's a single
letter, despite it not having a place in the alphabet. Some do try to give it
a place in the alphabet in place of the 'y', or before or after it but still
insisting there's only 26 letters in the alphabet.

It's really a digraph, a phoneme made out of two characters. But it's an
inconsistent digraph in that both characters are capitalised together, whereas
with other digraphs, only the first is capitalised.

It's not entirely true that 'y' is only used in foreign words. It's used in
import words that have been part of the Dutch language for a very long time
now. 'Royaal' and 'symbool' are not spelled like that in any neighbouring
language, so they've been thoroughly Dutchified over the centuries. They're
not foreign anymore.

------
Matticus_Rex
Love it! I'm learning Dutch in preparation for a move to the Netherlands next
year, and I'm tempted to make this a goal just to feed my competitive nature.

And also, you've just given a lot of people blueprints for doing well, so you
might actually make the game harder for teams on average. Go you!

~~~
pottertheotter
I'm curious, where are you moving from? And what's taking you there?

~~~
Matticus_Rex
The US.

My wife and I work remotely (for the same company), and we have to travel to
Amsterdam a couple of times a year (at minimum) for work. She fell in love
with it, and I'm interested in the adventure (and it's a great city). It would
also be useful for work for us to be there, though not necessary by any means.

------
yellow_lead
Looks like a lot of fun. Was the word that went viral the one with the "IJ"
letter? Forgive my ignorance of Dutch.

~~~
Noumenon72
Why would a word go viral?

~~~
netsharc
The dude said something that sounded close to "my ex" in English and then
spelled "Kutwijf" and there's laughter. So one could assume it's not a nice
word.

~~~
Insanity
Yeah he said literally "mijn ex" -> my ex. It wasn't a nice word :P

------
NiekvdMaas
I saw Andries a couple of weeks ago at a comedy night in Utrecht. His
demonstration of memorization of "best" words was impressive!

------
ricc
Did you come across the word “Tnetennba”?

~~~
Vinnl
The words were limited to five- or six-letter words, and I only took words
that occurred more than 500 times in the data set - otherwise I probably would
have!

------
contactlight11
Here is my version of this game I made in early high school a couple years
back. So, please forgive the crudeness...
[https://jondolan.io/fives/](https://jondolan.io/fives/)

I did not know of this game at the time, but I did hear from people that it
was basically Mastermind with words (although I have not played that). The
inspiration was a teacher of mine who used to work as a nuclear technician and
when he had the graveyard shift, he would play the game with the other
technician on duty over the phone.

~~~
lonelappde
It's originally called Jotto, and Mastermind is a generalization/de-
specification of it that came later.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto)

------
ggggtez
I was most disappointed that Google couldn't translate the words from Dutch.
Random other site got it right away.

------
ptspts
How does the one-week winning streak compare to the longest one ever achieved?

~~~
Vinnl
The show recently changed its format so that people who win are allowed to
come back the next day, so the longest one ever just happened to have been set
the week before - they took part in eleven episodes.

We certainly weren't the best ones ever, partly due to our own ability to find
the correct words even when many letters are given, and partly due to luck
playing a significant role in the actual game. (I didn't go into the luck-
based elements in the post, because our strategy couldn't influence that.)

------
Cpoll
"My first guess is 'actor'"

Should that be 'actors'?

~~~
Vinnl
Ah, you are right, I'll fix it right away. Thanks for reporting it!

------
rvanmil
Hilarious, love seeing this on HN =) Thanks for the write up!

------
arduinomancer
Really cool.

How much did you guys win?

~~~
Vinnl
Thanks. I detailed our wins here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21801310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21801310)

tl;dr We mostly did this for fun.

