When do you get a yellow square? I couldn't find this documented anywhere, so I took a look at the code.
Here's what I found: For each guess, Worldle calculates a proximity score from 0 to 100 -- higher is better. Each row is basically a quantized proximity score meter, from 0 to 100 in increments of 20. If you get at least half-way to the next increment of 20 (i.e. to the next green square), you get a yellow square, too.
Example: If your proximity score for a guess is 63, you'll get 3 green squares and two blank (white or black) squares, i.e. GGGBB. If your score is 71, you'll get three green squares, and since 71 is at least half-way to 80 (i.e. >= 70), you'll also get a yellow square, so GGGYB.
The proximity score is round(100*(MAX_DISTANCE_ON_EARTH - d)/MAX_DISTANCE_ON_EARTH). Though that max distance is defined to be 20,000,000.
> Though that max distance is defined to be 20,000,000.
This is almost true (in real life). The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole. Given that the earth is a fairly "nice" sphere, the maximum distance between any two points on earth is very close to 20,000,000 meters.
Almost but no. Today all the SI base units are defined in terms of a universal constant, so that if you understood how SI works you can do all the same metrication work from a distant galaxy, you don't need to be here on Earth. The metre is defined by the constant c, the "speed of light"
But because of this original definition the equator will work out to about 40000 km.
It also never was by definition. The meter was originally defined as (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metre) “one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris, assuming an Earth's flattening of 1/334”
You have to add the fact that earth is almost spherical to go, from there, to “the length of the equator is about 40 million meters”.
Reading that Wikipedia page, I think it already was known when the meter was defined that the polar diameter of the Earth is smaller than its equatorial diameter.
Well, the speed of light was measured in traditional meters and then new meters were redefined based on the existing speed of light. So the difference from 40000km attributable to redefinition would be on the order of centimeters or smaller; any deviation could only arise from our inability to measure the speed of light precisely, and we can be quite precise.
There's some difference (~7km, if we believe wikipedia) attributable to the original measurement of Earth's circumference being off, and much much more difference (~67km, ten times as much) attributable to the fact that the earth is slightly oblate. (In other words, meters were defined by reference to the polar circumference, but the equatorial circumference is larger than the polar circumference is.)
“The Mapmakers Wife” is an interesting book that tells the story of how explorers measured arcs of latitude and longitude around the world to figure all this out. The audiobook version is good too.
The meridian is 40,000 km, by original definition. Trace any great circle through both poles (any pair of antipodal meridians, such as 0° and 180°) and that is 40k km.
The equator is more than that because of the oblateness of the spheroid.
And nowadays, the meter is defined in terms of natural units (time and the speed of light) in a way to be compatible with the original definition by the meridian.
and one minute of longitude on the equator is 1/360/60 =1/21600th of it or around 1.855km or approximately 1nm. This decreases with cos of your latitude.
(for those mentally converting nm to nano meter and scratching your head) I think nm here means nautical mile which makes more sense in context than nanometer.
I'm not sure how the yellow square rendering is implemented, but for me it just shows a empty Unicode character for it (Firefox on MacOS) - black squares render properly though.
I was extremely confused about the distance values in relation to the percentages until I read the help:
> The distances displayed correspond to the distances between the selected and the target territory centers.
> For instance, the computed distance between United States and Canada is around 2260km even if they have a common border.
That's extremely deceptive and non-obvious unless you read through the documentation. One of the appeals of Wordle is that it is an extremely intuitive game which doesn't require rule reading.
So what is the percentage indicate separately from the distance?
I think the "right" way to display the distance would be from the closest points in the guessed and target territories. So United States and Canada, sharing a border, would be "0 km", while Canada and Mexico would be whatever the shortest path from border to border would be (like 2,000km?)
I have a feeling that's a bit more difficult than centers, though. But it wouldn't be a problem as far as outlying territories go; the image is of a contiguous landmass, not the entire country.
True. But to perform that precomputation, you have to find a database of country geometry outlines. And (manually?) filter out things like Hawaii and Guam from these. Then, assuming country geometry is given as lat lon polygons, it seems you then are computing either O(n^2 * m^2) distances where n is the number of countries and m is the average number of vertices per country. Or you might come up with some space partitioning algorithm on the vertices to reduce that to maybe O(n^2 * m log(m)). It's doable, but my comment was merely pointing out that it's much more complex than comparing country centers.
It's really a shame the developer didn't add this feature. One might be scared off by the large number of geometry files involved with this, but actually this is a great example of when hard coding can supersede dynamic/robust code. It would be better to simply store an object of all countries borders and the their relative direction to one another. I could see this being a slight issue with countries that share a border with another that is many directions of their border (Lesotho and South Africa, for example), but it would still be much less deceptive than saying "the USA is 2000km south of Canada."
> But then you get Canada and you instantly know it's the USA next.
So in your hypothetical scenario....this hypothetical player would know that the only country Canada has a land border with is the USA, but not know what the USA looks like so as to be able to solve this without first guessing Canada?
This seems improbable to me. Chances are that if someone knows enough about a country that it's a 'single neighbor' country, or that it has a 'single neighbor' country, they will also know what the country looks like.
For example, if someone instantly knows that if they typed in Haiti it must then be the Dominican Republic, chances are very high that they wouldn't have typed Haiti because they also know what the Dominican Republic looks like. Much like chances are high that if someone knows that Canada only borders the USA, they also wouldn't have typed Canada in the first place, but would have guessed USA right away.
Assuming by "size" you mean something like average/longest distance from the center this is the worst possible answer because it's super non-intuitive and can create crazy results like negative answers.
Fun fact, Google Earth had its coordinates defaulted to an apartment complex in Lawrence, Kansas, apparently the childhood home of one of the engineers, but also roughly the center of the United States.
Great question! Is it the center of a convex hull containing the extent of territories? Or would you weight it by population? Is it in two dimensions on the surface of the Earth, or in three dimensions?
Consider the possible “center” of France. There’s probably some village in France proper with a monument, but unless you eject Guiana and Réunion I think it must be in the Atlantic somewhere.
Territories (eg French Guiana) are specifically separated in Worldle, even being possible answers themselves.
Also, this is a map game, so for me it's pretty intuitive that it is the center of the hull. Maybe with some error due to projection (not sure how they implemented the map), but should not be a problem for solving the puzzle.
That’s my understanding too. Something about Napoleon wanting to be egalitarian. Has the interesting side-effect that France is both the western-most and eastern-most country in the EU.
> In 1801, Louverture issued a constitution for Saint-Domingue [now Haiti] that decreed he would be governor-for-life and called for black autonomy and a sovereign black state. In response, Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched a large expeditionary force of French soldiers and warships to the island, led by Bonaparte's brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, to restore French rule. They were under secret instructions to restore slavery, at least in the formerly Spanish-held part of the island.
> Also, this is a map game, so for me it's pretty intuitive that it is the center of the hull.
I don't follow. How does this being a map game make it intuitive that the distance outputs are based on hull centers? To me, closest border would seem be the most intuitive reading of the distance...this being a map game.
If you poll 10 random people, I guarantee 10/10 would say that they consider borders to be the intuitive means of measurement of distance between two countries, not their (hull) centers.
> For the arrow hint to work at all, countries need to be a single point.
First of all; no, not at all. The arrow hint can work if countries are considered a mass, not a point, it simply means that there can be times when there are any number of correct arrow designations.
Second of all, even if countries are considered as single points for the arrow hint, that is not the issue being presently discussed: that of the distance hint, which is a separate hint from the arrow hint. Countries can be considered as single points for the arrow hint, and as masses for the distance hint.
I don’t know what you mean by “considered a mass” unless you mean “centre of mass”, which is a point. If there are times where there are a lot of correct arrow designations, how is that not more confusing?
In my opinion, using a different measure for the distance and direction would have been even more confusing. It’s also a lot harder to program for a silly web game.
My reading of it is that it's easiest to program if they just ask google maps the latlon of the country and use that. It's a lot more work to base it off the closest border.
Interesting, since my understanding of the matter is that the status of Guiana within France is as integral with that nation as Alaska is with the U.S.
If you weight it by the actual size of territories rather than just the extreme boundaries then the center is indeed in Spain, because the overseas regions are still rather small in comparison to the European part of France.
If you use only the extreme boundaries then it gets a lot more interesting and I would say that the center is closer to the center of the Earth than to its surface.
To be fair, Wordle also doesn't require much external knowledge beyond a basic vocabulary. This is aimed at a more narrow crowd and is just a fun experiment.
I think Wordle requires a pretty extensive vocabulary to be played successfully. Though you could say the same thing about Worldle: it doesn't require much external knowledge beyond basic geography.
For Wordle, a decent vocabulary and also some intuition about letter frequency, the likelihood of letter combinations in various positions, etc. For this "basic geography" I guess but that would include knowing the names and approximate locations of some fairly obscure and not distinctive looking countries. (That said, if I cared enough to do so, I could probably bone up on my geography for a couple hours and I could probably do better.
Worldle also doesn't require rule reading. I've been playing it for a week and never read any documentation. It's quite intuitive if you're not interested in nitpicking exactly what the distance measurement means.
Yeah, I agree that’s pretty confusing. That being said I had to read the Wordle rules the first time I played. Had no idea what the differences were between colors and that a letter could be used multiple times in the same word.
Wouldn't that make countries like the USA and Canada extremely far apart because they are both large countries? The distance you would get is the distance from Hawaii to somewhere on the northeastern edge of Nunavut/Newfoundland/Labrador
> Not quite, you'd get the maximum distance from the extreme end of one territory to the nearest point of the other.
But which country do you pick the extreme edge of, and which country do you pick the nearest point of? For example, if measuring US<->Canada, do you pick the extreme end of Canada or the extreme end of the US?
For every point in both territories, find the closest point in the other territory. From these pairs of points, find the pair with the largest distance. That distance is your Hausdorff distance.
How is it deceptive? To me it's an extra tidbit of information that doesn't seem important. It's clearly linked with distance, so I know it's something to do with distance.
When people talk about how far one country is from another, chances are extremely unlikely they are referring to how far their central points are from one another.
That's true, but it takes a moment to realize the intuitive first thought couldn't work in practice. So it must be something like the centers. Plus the exact distance doesn't matter in this game.
they could have simply used distance between geometries like st_distance in postgres. curious about edge cases here where for example one coordinate is 178 longitude and another -178 longitude. also does this game show whole countries which have territories over great distances like france denmark or norway
The arrows mean that the target is in that direction from your guess (NOT from the target country). I interpreted at as meaning the opposite, which made things tricky
There's an infinite number of straight lines that eventually lead to Mexico from any starting point, but (if I'm thinking straight) there's only a finite number of ways to not get to Mexico from a specific staring point.
I've been playing semantle.novalis.org daily. It's hard enough that I don't want to start again when I'm done and I like that everyone is playing the same game with me. The problem with this is that it's too easy to allow infinite guesses but if you don't get it in 5 you want to start again right away.
There's also a version with vector maps, and multiple other decks with varying fields in the cards and amounts of info. In my experience, decks are a matter of personal preference to a large degree—seeing as ideally you're dealing with them closely every day. So you might want to take a look at different ones and choose for yourself: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/geography
I don't understand how this works? It had a picture of _____, and the correct answer was ______. Is it just guessing the country name based on the shape?
edit - hid my answer in case it wasn't as obvious to others.
Todays question was super easy for a lot of people. Past countries have been things like Turks & Cacos, Liberia, Guatemala. Those I got close to and then the last guess or two I was scanning around google maps.
Yeah it’s not as fun as Wordle, kinda interesting for a few plays though.
I wonder if this was posted every day and only got upvoted when a country that is definitely in the top 5 easiest and virtually everyone will get it in one or two tries was on offer.
I wish the rotation would be on by default (the distances are enough of a hint), or at least work if I turn it on.
Guatemala was surprisingly hard for me. I discovered I really have no idea what the countries in Central America actually look like. I got it by naming literally every single Central American country think of, and then thinking really hard which one I missed. Guatemala has an interesting border I won't easily forget anymore.
On the other hand, I got Nepal in one, which I'm unreasonably proud of.
My world geography is pretty good but there are still a lot of small countries that I'm going to be vague on their shapes, exact locations, and even current names.
How can you get it wrong, though? You are basically presented the solution. It's like if Wordle would show you the picture of a tiger and asks for the word "TIGER". And if you don't recognize a country by it's borders and just take a wild guess, something like "you are 5000km off!" probably won't help you much anyway, which is apparently what you are getting shown on a wrong guess according to comments here.
There are a ton of countries and territories in places like Africa and the Pacific Ocean that many/most people don't know what they look like and have, at best, a vague notion of their location and may not even recall their name unaided.
oh, shoot. i assumed i was trying to guess an island nation since it wasn't rendered with any surroundings. but it renders all states this way — just the border, as if it had no neighbors?
Please put it in bold font on the main page that there’s no way to get new puzzle and you need yo wait for a day. I was very confused while looking for the button to restart.
Yeah I don't get the point of this as is. At least the current country is nothing short of obvious, so everyone gets it right on first guess and then just waits a day?
It also makes Firefox consider all your add-ons invalid when it next does a signature check, removing tracking protection and any custom tab bar you have, practically requiring you to restart the browser to continue using it as a browser. It also messes up "reopen last tab", opening something random instead, sometimes with a mangled URL.
I should just modify the game's code instead but so far it has been easier to write a bash oneliner that changes the date, presses F5 on the page, and changes it back, hoping Firefox doesn't do its ~hourly sig check during that moment. Sometimes it needs an F5 while the time is set correctly because the certificate isn't valid for far-out dates. (No idea why it works other times, it really shouldn't.)
It's a bit frustrating that it changes daily, the first country was too easy so I missed out on all the mechanics and now I have to wait until tomorrow to try again.
Should probably be population, population density, and GDP/capita. Nobody knows the GDP of Mexico, but they might know it's about the same as Serbia per capita.
The thing I find fascinating about this is that it will need to become contentious by fall, either by repetition or by selecting territories which are historical and/or unrecognized by some subset of the world with a real or perceived stake in that.
Is it cheating to look at a map? I got a very nearby country so I looked to see what was around it which shows the shape quite clearly. I guess as an educational tool, it’s still very good that way. I now know how those countries are geographically related, in an area I don’t know very well.
Like the Wordle, the only person who determines if it’s cheating is you. How you enjoy it is all up to you. There are settings to rotate or hide the map here, so we’re not all playing the same game anyway.
> the only person who determines if it’s cheating is you
This is something that is unequivocally true, yet I get mildly irritated/frustrated (is there a word for combination of these two?) when people use google or something to "get words".
> There are settings to rotate or hide the map here, so we’re not all playing the same game anyway.
Wordle has hard mode too. But in this case you see the map before given this option. And at least the rotation doesn't work for me.
I understand that feeling. The social aspect of the Wordle - sharing grids — creates an expectation of some social agreement on scores.
But I doubt HN could agree on what is good sporting wordling. Some of us like to guess with no sources save our minds; some of us wrote code to generate optimal strategies. And like, it’s super easy to just delete lines from the share button output, if you feel embarrassed. We all had fun with it differently, at different skill levels, which made it a special phenomenon.
If you compare with friends, tell em what tools you use. They can say you cheat, or you’re cheating yourself, but if you’re having fun and being honest, you’re playing it right.
> yet I get mildly irritated/frustrated (is there a word for combination of these two?)
Would be nice to have some more geographic hints like rivers or major cities, i.e. night lights. Also as someone whose long term memory of geography is sustained by occasionally humming Yakko's world song, it's depressing to learn how inaccurate / out of date it is.
Really impressive. This is something i would play every day. I love Geography and this is amazing for discovering and learning about new places.
Great work!
Now these two comments explain some other. I got #27 which was probably the worst choice for this game. I can only think of two easier country outlines to pick.
I guess there should be a wordle for each subject, like Nerdle for Math, worldle for Geography. And here is a wordle for History: https://peotik.com/otd/
Good old-fashioned memorization using blank maps (Googling "blank map [continent]" will give you plenty) will get you farther than you might expect. Having the name and place anchored in your head makes offhand news stories about those places stick much more easily.
Edit: looking at the source code, it seems to take your local system time so that would be one. Wonder if I can just go through each country in random order without repeating.
Here's what I found: For each guess, Worldle calculates a proximity score from 0 to 100 -- higher is better. Each row is basically a quantized proximity score meter, from 0 to 100 in increments of 20. If you get at least half-way to the next increment of 20 (i.e. to the next green square), you get a yellow square, too.
Example: If your proximity score for a guess is 63, you'll get 3 green squares and two blank (white or black) squares, i.e. GGGBB. If your score is 71, you'll get three green squares, and since 71 is at least half-way to 80 (i.e. >= 70), you'll also get a yellow square, so GGGYB.
The proximity score is round(100*(MAX_DISTANCE_ON_EARTH - d)/MAX_DISTANCE_ON_EARTH). Though that max distance is defined to be 20,000,000.
This is the important part: https://github.com/teuteuf/worldle/blob/67db30bdf79c0965c19a...