The NYT reports, and here's a gift link. I've always played in hard mode. I don't know if that's because my intuition told me it was easier or because I could see it would be more fun, but it certainly wasn't in order to make it harder on myself.
Players in hard mode solve in fewer turns on average.... Those in hard mode have a lower rate of failing to solve in six turns.... Hard mode seems to help players avoid poor choices.... Standard-mode players have more freedom but often don’t know how to use it. Not needing to use revealed letters, they have many more choices on their second and third turns.
David Epstein, author of “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better,” said in an interview that in any area of life, “when options are really large” there’s a tendency to “back out of a decision or make a poor one.” Citing the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, he said the brain is mostly not for thinking, but for preventing you from thinking. “It’s wired for convenience, the easy thing, the first thing to pop to mind,” he said, while constraints can paradoxically lead to creativity and productivity....
I get it. We're supposed to think: The choice of hard mode or easy mode in Wordle is like a choice we make in how to live our life. And that's why you might want to stick to tradition (if you are conservative) or have government experts eliminate most of the choices (if you are progressive).
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I mentally start in hard mode and switch to easy when necessary. -ound is unsolvable in hard mode.
I immediately went to better players choose hard mode mode and the story acknowledges a maybe This all suggests the possibility of a selection effect, and the data supports a small one. Of course the story is sparse on actual data and big on conclusions from the jounolist majors. Also, cock full of socialist ‘choices are bad’ gospel, without details or supporting data. They do give some hard vs not numbers, what look lacking in robust significance to me…
"... -ound is unsolvable in hard mode."
I'd still stay in hard mode. It adds a thrill, risking losing your streak. It's like roulette.
…here’s an economist briefly mentioning the paradox of choice. ten principles of economics
Isn't a revealed letter one which must be in the solution? So what's the point of a guess which doesn't contain them? Or do I misunderstand?
Were people better off when they had to find someone to marry in their own little town than nowadays when they can use dating apps until they die?
"Isn't a revealed letter one which must be in the solution? So what's the point of a guess which doesn't contain them?"
To eliminate a bunch of possible letters in one turn and then in the next turn use what you've discovered.
Players in hard mode solve in fewer turns on average
Better players and players who are more confident about their choices pick hard mode. Wouldn't you have to have random people play and randomly assign them hard or easy mode to know?
I like that our host found a way to make the choice between hard and standard mode apply to either side of the political spectrum. I wouldn't call that neutrality "cruel" - it seems quite a bit kinder, to me, than most journalists find themselves able to be when faced with the choice of whether or not to put a partial framing around a story.
Sorry, a *partisan* framing.
“You have free access to this story. Log in to read.”
lol
Personally, I prefer easy mode as it forces me to think more strategically. Hard mode is more dependent on luck.
Thats a ridiculous notion he calls himself a scientists
I’d strongly wager it’s selection bias. Easy mode allows a skilled player to eliminate many more letters more quickly than they might in hard mode. For example, 7 common words end in -ight (plus 2 less common ones). You could lose in hard mode simply because there are too many options to test. A skilled player in easy mode would have a better win rate than the same player in hard mode.
Maybe the better players choose hard mode because non-hard mode is too easy.
I didn't know there were different modes. Now that I see the rules for hard mode, I've been following them all along, just informally. I almost never deliberately guess a wrong word just to use more letters.
Calling something hard when it’s easier indicates a progressive mindset.
Tradition is always both an imposition and a choice. Lacking one or the other, it doesn't get called tradition.
Assuming there is a correct choice, isn't less options simple math and odds of a better choice?
Maybe dating apps should have a hard mode and an easy mode.
Maybe in the future AI will arrange marriages.
Bob Boyd said...Maybe dating apps should have a hard mode and an easy mode.
They do--an easy mode for women and a hard mode for men.
"I immediately went to better players choose hard mode mode and the story acknowledges a maybe"
Me, too. There is really only one good way to answer this question- study the people who use both modes. If there is a selection effect, then those people will do better on the easier version. If there is no selection effect, then they will do better on the "hard" version. As I understand the study, they don't really know the composition, based on skill, of the two types of players and are assuming they are of the same quality.
And, finally, there is the issue of how to define which is easy mode and which is hard mode. I don't play Wordle but for those here who have, what is your opinion of the two modes- which is easier and which is harder for you?
"Maybe in the future AI will arrange marriages."
Let people CHOOSE to use AI to arrange the match. I can see why they would. It's not as though you HAVE to accept what is arranged. Even in traditional arranged marriages, you have final say in whether you want to proceed. AI could look at the whole pool and see who's suited to each other, who's on the same level. Keep people in their "league," not always endlessly wanting somebody more beautiful and/or successful. It could include what it can figure out about what keeps people together and what leads to good families.
I think Kylos and Yancey have it right. Unless you are comparing the same player(s) in both modes the results are corrupted by selection bias, assuming that 'easy' is the default. The assumption that better players voluntarily chose hard mode is probably accurate but good easy mode play is probably swamped by casual players.
It's only a game.
Not an ideal metric; what's the time-to-solve for easy vs hard modes?
I always said in my career as a Tool and Die Maker that everyone starts their apprenticeship knowing how to do everything, the 4 years are spent learning all the things not to do.
It's not as though you HAVE to accept what is arranged.
True, but if you turn up your nose at AI's proffered mate, it might go off in a snit and never talk to you again.
"Hey, AI, could you help me with x, y or z?"
"Fuuuuck you, ingrate. You wouldn't even have that problem right now if you had listened to me about your perfect match."
Next up, those same researchers are going to tell us about risks in nuclear power, and the impending flooding of Florida and NYC.
Bob, we joke that the GPS directions lady (GooGirl) already does that. If you don't follow her suggested route, she becomes much less helpful - delaying upcoming turn advice to the last second, for example.
I can't pass up an opportunity to brag. I avoided Wordle for a long time as I am averse to hype and I don't read the NYT. I was urged by a friend to try it (on the theory that I would enjoy it).
I reluctantly agreed to do so and, while I was trying to figure out how to access it, found out one could do it in a different language, so I chose German. On my first attempt, I won. Never looked back, never did it again.
People who want to be in the AI arranged marriage pool will have to give it access to their financials and their medical records and their criminal records, etc.
It will be kind of like Carfax.
Imagine, as a thought experiment, an even harder mode. A "Ludicrous Mode" that will not accept any guesses other than an exact match. For example, suppose the target word is DOUGH. The player trying to enter an five-letter word besides DOUGH would find that he cannot even submit it.
This would be much less enjoyable and almost nobody would ever solve the word. But for the few that did, think of their stats! 100% one-guess solve rate, 0% fail rate. And the writer of this article could write a new one, "Ludicrous Mode is Actually the Easiest Mode Ever!"
When I started playing Wordle, I played in Hard mode, and I ran up a streak of 238 games before losing for the first time on TAUNT, with the many choices on the first letter getting me. Since then, I've not used Hard mode. My current streak is 116, and when that one ends eventually, I will switch to Hard mode for one game to earn the badge, then switch back. I prefer the freedom to play a completely unconnected word if there are more possibilities than guesses left. I haven't done it in the past three months or so, though, as I generally follow the information I get from the words, but I reserve the option to break the glass if necessary.
“ So I sometimes wonder whether my commitment to difficult poetry is merely the elitism of an aging critic who mistrusts the simpler pleasures. But then often when I do take considerable pleasure in a poem that is not provocatively difficult, that pleasure turns quickly to guilt, to a feeling that I am betraying allegiances and succumbing to seductions that oversimplify the intricacies of experience.” — Charles Altieri
I didn't know there was a choice of modes.
I have lost some good streaks — in Wordle and Connections — just by forgetting to do the puzzle.
I have lost some good streaks just by switching to a new computer.
Althouse, that happened to me at the beginning of my current streak. I thought I'd played the day before and looked down to see that my streak was 0. I was up in the low 200s at the time and looking forward to breaking my 238-streak within a few weeks and pushing for the 250-game streak award. I was quite pissed off about forgetting to play, but what can you do?
The hard-core Wordle fanatics on Reddit play in hard mode, but they often use weird starter words like SALET or TARSE that are among the 14,355 words that can be played but aren't among the ~2300 words that were on the original Wordle list. Those words are among the best to avoid traps in hard mode, supposedly. You won't get an ace with them, though.
@ Ron Winkleheimer
You just click on the Settings icon, and Hard Mode is the first setting; slide to toggle on or off.
"'I didn't know there were different modes." Nor did I. I've been playing from day one at NYT. I most certainly don't 'over-think' the game.
One correction: There are 14,855 possible words that can be played, according to the Scoredle app, not 14,355. Scoredle is interesting to use after playing Wordle to see how many possible words were left after playing each word.
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