You've got a bug somewhere. I entered the correct number for today 4 times and the third digit got flipped by the software every single time. I thought I had fat-fingered at first, but I very slowly typed it afterwards. It always switched the 1 to a 0 (which is incorrect, obvs).
I've implemented a change to the game's instructions that clarifies that the user needs to enter a denary (base-10) number and not binary (base-2). Hopefully that should make it a bit easier for people to understand how to play!
Using a binary calculator is like using a scrabble solver for wordle. Of course it ruins the fun.
The game shouldn't show you the binary values from your number though, just the correct/incorrect state, so you need to apply the mental maths.
Try tapping on the area where it says "Enter a number" — typically your browser should focus the input there on first load, but if you click off, the placeholder text will be shown instead.
On Safari, press the 'Done' button — I had to add a blur event to enable iOS users to play the game (due to the lack of enter key on the iOS numpad). Android users are unaffected since they have an enter key.
It seems like it should only accept input less than 256.
I put in something like 10,010,001 -- and it accepted it. This got me thinking that I was supposed to be inputting my guesses in binary, which I now realize is not how the game works.
OTOH, doing dumb (but consistent/logical) things with players' input could enhance a metalesson about how computers often misunderstand intent, or common overflow/format/etc bugs. With such a simple core game, figuring-out-the-underspecified-rules-of-the-game can be part of the true metagame.
Or as an easter egg, maybe you can enter binary & others - but precisely, as a programmer must, as `0b00000000` (etc).
Not really. With any first guess you can figure out what the correct number is on the second guess. After any first guess, keep the correct bits, flip everything else, convert to decimal and enter it in as your second guess. Guessing 0 for first guess is just a special case of this strategy.
- Each cell can only take one of two values, therefore any guess is sufficient to gather enough information to select the right answer on the second try (as long as you understand binary).
- The act us converting base2 <-> base10 is trivial for computers, but laborious for humans. The majority of time on this game is spent doing this mental labour (or using a converter in a separate app).
- The optimal strategy is immediately apparent, so there is no reason to play more than one round. It is solved.
How Wordle compares:
- Each cell takes one of 26 values, but one can only guess 6 times, so brute force information gathering is not a vaiable strategy, per cell. However, one can potentially eliminate 5 values per round, so one can at least brute force 25 different letters with a round to spare (plus some additional hints on their positioning). The probability distribution of each of these letters varies over each space, and is conditional on what is occupied in other spaces. For example, 'C' is a middling letter, but if you have an 'H' in position 2 or a 'K' in position 5 the letter 'C' shoots up the charts. Same for a 'G' in position 5 affecting the probability of an 'N' in position 4.
- The game's domain knowledge is not base conversions, but rather the English language.This requires recall, mental filtering, and shuffling hinted letters around, which are cognitively simple but also hard enough to be rewarding. I think the dependence upon the user's vocabulary adds some uncertainty that is exciting.
- The optimal strategy is not immediately apparent. It has been solved by bots but manual strategies vary greatly and there is room for inspiration/innovation. What opening word do I use? Do I prioritise trimming values from the alphabet, or determining the location of hinted letters? Should I check for letters occurring more than once?
How the Bytle game could be adjusted to be more entertaining:
- Potential values per cell need to increase. For example, hexadecimal instead of binary.
- Avoid loading the user with the cognitive challenge of converting bases. If you show values in hexadecimal, let the user write in hexadecimal.
- The domain space needs to change. A uniform distribution where each square is uncorrelated with others is not fun. Maybe add a hint like: "is divisible by 7" to add some intrigue and dependencies between the spaces.
Thanks for your analysis of both Wordle and Bytle — when my friends and I came up with this game, we didn't expect the game to be in any form challenging compared to games that are similar in nature to it. It was mainly just a joke considering that it is trivial to find the value of a cell when there are only two states. The base-10 entry is designed to make it some way a bit more challanging than entering base-2, but of course isn't how Wordle and its clones normally work.
Your feedback is certainly valuable though — mayble Hexle could be a thing! I'm happy to give that idea away to anyone who's looking for the challange of implementing it. And as you say with modifying the domain space, adding some sort of requirement for the entered number would be a good addition, too.
FWIW, I got the joke and thought it was good for a chuckle. But it would probably be more obvious/maybe a better joke if players had to input the numbers in binary.
Took me a while to figure out that there was an invisible text field in the middle of the page for entering your guess. Using mobile Safari on an iPhone 12 mini.
the wordle equivalent of figuring out a number would be simply telling you if it's greater or less than your previous guess (i.e. teaching the masses about binary search)
Hey James, this is a really cool idea. I don't think HN is really your target audience, but early CS students sure are. I could have seen a teacher using this in Highschool or early college. It seems like a great way to practice base conversion. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks! That's partly one of my ideas for the target audience, but of course to get the game's popularity rolling, it's not as easy pitching to CS educators/students as it is posting on Hacker News; so to get the game out there, I decided to post it here for now. Seems Bytle (and the newer Hexle I made about an hour ago) is doing the rounds on Twitter now, so it might become noticed by non-HNers soon!
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something but it would sometimes flip numbers I entered on ios. My 1 kept being exposed as a 0. Really frustrating when I enter the correct number but it says otherwise.
Wow, from headline thought this'd be a one-note joke, & thus kinda dumb.
But trying actual mechanics I now see it as "ha, ha, but serious" – a fun little illustration of the different contours of binary-strings vs words, with a minigame of in-the-head decimal-binary conversion. Bravo! For people at a certain stage of learning computer science, it's perfect.
Love the FAQ too. (Sp: 'tommorow` -> `tomorrow`.)
Further along the joke/idea, you could add:
• a timer, which starts on 1st guess, for an extra competitive dimension.
• a 'random guess' button (as in Absurdle), so people don't start with the superficially-easiest-to-reason-from `0` or `255` guesses every time – & if deterministically pseudorandom per day, everyone who starts with the same 'random' guess could still compare timings. (I'd instinctively started with the same serial number as today's puzzle, just in case that was part of the joke. But the serial number could be the 'random' 1st guess!)
• 'Hammle', which somehow mixes in either a hamming-weight hint or guess-requirement, of either the target-number or some product of guess & target
• 'Bitwisle', which displays a randomly-chosen logic-operator over each column, & the hints returned in that slot aren't mastermind-style but some other bitwise combo of guess & target. ('advanced bitwisle': user has to figure out the operators, too; 'super bitwisle': hint squares are produced by varied mixed-operations on nearby answer-bits - any "Rocky's Boots" fans out there?)
• 'Noisle', which gives hints with some error-rate, either fixed or also part-of-the-game to estimate - maybe there's a parity/checksum bit in the message, or hints, too.
You got it spot on! Thanks for sharing your ideas too — there's definitely a lot of potential with Wordle-like games! I've recently created a newer version of Hexle which is making its way up the Show HN list just like Bytle, so you might enjoy that, too! Hexle's a bit more challenging imo.
Hexle's definitely got more replayable-value for casual players, & a valuable contribution to painting-in the whole possibility-space. But, it has a lot of competition for such casual-player-hours!
I personally still like Bytle better for its conceptual/instructive qualities. It may be more likely to enjoy an evergreen slow-burn of interest as part of math/CS curricula. For example, 'Bytle solver' would be a baby-step towards many other lines-of-learning – including, eventually, Wordle-solvers.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 96.5 ms ] threadProbably can impress your non-programmer friends?
I'd say that's an accurate reason as to why this was also created... But yeah, not to hard to beat in just two turns!
https://github.com/James-Livesey/bytle/issues/3
I put in something like 10,010,001 -- and it accepted it. This got me thinking that I was supposed to be inputting my guesses in binary, which I now realize is not how the game works.
Or as an easter egg, maybe you can enter binary & others - but precisely, as a programmer must, as `0b00000000` (etc).
Simply guess all 0's. Then wherever you were wrong guess a 1 the next time.
I can also solve it first guess 1/256 times, but that is less surprising.
- Each cell can only take one of two values, therefore any guess is sufficient to gather enough information to select the right answer on the second try (as long as you understand binary).
- The act us converting base2 <-> base10 is trivial for computers, but laborious for humans. The majority of time on this game is spent doing this mental labour (or using a converter in a separate app).
- The optimal strategy is immediately apparent, so there is no reason to play more than one round. It is solved.
How Wordle compares:
- Each cell takes one of 26 values, but one can only guess 6 times, so brute force information gathering is not a vaiable strategy, per cell. However, one can potentially eliminate 5 values per round, so one can at least brute force 25 different letters with a round to spare (plus some additional hints on their positioning). The probability distribution of each of these letters varies over each space, and is conditional on what is occupied in other spaces. For example, 'C' is a middling letter, but if you have an 'H' in position 2 or a 'K' in position 5 the letter 'C' shoots up the charts. Same for a 'G' in position 5 affecting the probability of an 'N' in position 4.
- The game's domain knowledge is not base conversions, but rather the English language.This requires recall, mental filtering, and shuffling hinted letters around, which are cognitively simple but also hard enough to be rewarding. I think the dependence upon the user's vocabulary adds some uncertainty that is exciting.
- The optimal strategy is not immediately apparent. It has been solved by bots but manual strategies vary greatly and there is room for inspiration/innovation. What opening word do I use? Do I prioritise trimming values from the alphabet, or determining the location of hinted letters? Should I check for letters occurring more than once?
How the Bytle game could be adjusted to be more entertaining:
- Potential values per cell need to increase. For example, hexadecimal instead of binary.
- Avoid loading the user with the cognitive challenge of converting bases. If you show values in hexadecimal, let the user write in hexadecimal.
- The domain space needs to change. A uniform distribution where each square is uncorrelated with others is not fun. Maybe add a hint like: "is divisible by 7" to add some intrigue and dependencies between the spaces.
Your feedback is certainly valuable though — mayble Hexle could be a thing! I'm happy to give that idea away to anyone who's looking for the challange of implementing it. And as you say with modifying the domain space, adding some sort of requirement for the entered number would be a good addition, too.
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30118898
Not a great effort.
Got a big LOL from me. I think the irony of Bytle has been lost on the crowd here! Great work by the way.
But trying actual mechanics I now see it as "ha, ha, but serious" – a fun little illustration of the different contours of binary-strings vs words, with a minigame of in-the-head decimal-binary conversion. Bravo! For people at a certain stage of learning computer science, it's perfect.
Love the FAQ too. (Sp: 'tommorow` -> `tomorrow`.)
Further along the joke/idea, you could add:
• a timer, which starts on 1st guess, for an extra competitive dimension.
• a 'random guess' button (as in Absurdle), so people don't start with the superficially-easiest-to-reason-from `0` or `255` guesses every time – & if deterministically pseudorandom per day, everyone who starts with the same 'random' guess could still compare timings. (I'd instinctively started with the same serial number as today's puzzle, just in case that was part of the joke. But the serial number could be the 'random' 1st guess!)
• a 'hard mode', ha-ha
Potential advanced variants:
• 16-, 32-, & 64-bit versions – 'Binarywordle', 'Longle', 'Longlongle', etc – join the 21st Century!
• 'Hammle', which somehow mixes in either a hamming-weight hint or guess-requirement, of either the target-number or some product of guess & target
• 'Bitwisle', which displays a randomly-chosen logic-operator over each column, & the hints returned in that slot aren't mastermind-style but some other bitwise combo of guess & target. ('advanced bitwisle': user has to figure out the operators, too; 'super bitwisle': hint squares are produced by varied mixed-operations on nearby answer-bits - any "Rocky's Boots" fans out there?)
• 'Noisle', which gives hints with some error-rate, either fixed or also part-of-the-game to estimate - maybe there's a parity/checksum bit in the message, or hints, too.
Thanks!
I personally still like Bytle better for its conceptual/instructive qualities. It may be more likely to enjoy an evergreen slow-burn of interest as part of math/CS curricula. For example, 'Bytle solver' would be a baby-step towards many other lines-of-learning – including, eventually, Wordle-solvers.