Rabscuttle
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unveil - 2
dinghy - 1
hoarse - 2

Is there any particular reason why there's no repeated letters allowed?

zex20913
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They would be difficult to judge, give too much information away, and be difficult to guess.

Say somebody put "Thoth" (just saying, only a Star Wars word, I think) and the word was "those".

I'd score that as a 3, but that tells the people that "t,h, and o" are in the word. That makes it easier.

We may also score it as a 5, because each letter is in the word, thus giving away the information easily again.

Finally, if the word was a double lettered one (thoth), it would take much longer to guess the word. As it is, the turnover rate is quite good, and that keeps the game both active and fun.

Plus, that's how I was taught it, so that's how it stands.

I do think they're good reasons though. If you guys convince me otherwise (good luck) I may change the rule, and add a note for newcomers to the thread.

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Mattcrampy
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How would you score a word if it used twice a letter that appeared in the word once? How would you score a word if it used once a letter that appears twice? And from that, how would you score a word which uses twice a letter that appears twice in the word so it's consistant with the other two?

With that said, coarse
dragon
hearse

Edit: dude, you're supposed to be in Germany.

[Edited by Mattcrampy at Local Time:06-11-2005 at 09:44 AM]

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Rabscuttle
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I'd prefer allowing doubled letters.

I don't think that they are harder to score, you just use regular mastermind rules. (ignoring position, of course)

Essentially, just considering one letter, the score for that letter would be minimum(letters in word, letters in guess)

So if the word is "bulb"

babe - 2
loll - 1
blow - 2
ball - 2

Double-letter guesses only give away more if they have the letters in them - they are more likely to be 0s. Also, a score of 3 for "thoth" doesn't tell you that "tho" is in it - it could also be "tto", "tth", "hho", "hht" - so it can be trickier.

---

coarse - 3
dragon - 1
hearse - two e's


[Edited by Rabscuttle at Local Time:06-11-2005 at 09:27 AM: clarifying]

zex20913
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Mattcrampy wrote:
dude, you're supposed to be in Germany.

Yeah...I know. And I am! I just happen to have in-room internet access through a proxy server (no uploading anything) and it's got very fickle service.

Rabscuttle, another argument against double letters is that scores of 0 in this game are actually good. Very good in fact. It lets you know X amount of letters that are not in the word. It's harder to get those if you have to guess the exact amount of letters.

Doubling letters would increase the scores of 0, and take away some of the logic required to find the word.

If more people end up wanting doubles, I'll allow them, because that's what the people want, but I think it'd taint the game a touch.

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Rabscuttle
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I can see that people might be inclined to guess words with few distinct letters to try to increase the chance of eliminating letters, but I think the added complexity from more words and repeated letter logic more than makes up for it.

Anyway...

The Stew Boy wrote:
heads
heaps
hopes

It's a 6 letter word

The Stew Boy
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edit: deleted that post...didn't want the world to see my shame
Oh well, erm...
Sailor
Employ


[Edited by The Stew Boy at Local Time:06-12-2005 at 11:41 AM]

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scurvy

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Rabscuttle
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Aye, that be it!

acrobat
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Here's a simple scoring program that can be run to score folks' guesses. If you don't have perl then you can paste the script in here and select "perl script".

#!/usr/bin/perl
# change this to whatever your word is
my $word = 'alchemy';

# change this to the words you want to score
my @guesses = qw(
auditor
rhyming
ratioed
);

for (@guesses) {
    my ($guess) = split;
    my $score = 0;
    $score += ($guess =~ /$_/) for split //, $word;
    $score = 'Invalid - double letter' if $guess =~ /(.).*\\1/;
    $score = 'Invalid - wrong length' if length($guess) != length($word);
    print "$candidate - $score\\n";
}

Mattcrampy
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Yar, I be firin' ye a five letter broadside!

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The Stew Boy
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heaps
rakes
cream

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What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?

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thick
nudge
moist

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frame
stare
think

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What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?

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video
audio

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blind
amigo

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Rabscuttle
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oxide

Mattcrampy
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Rabscuttle wrote:
oxide

Bam.

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What do you call an elephant at the North Pole?

Rabscuttle
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huzzah!

Let's bring out the big guns and go for 8 letters.

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projects

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B'hakhgra Du S'tra Moth'ness Ti!

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auditors
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