If you’ve fallen far enough down the Wordle rabbit hole you may have heard of Quordle, a version of Wordle where you solve four words at once. If you’re looking for more of a challenge, Britannica has you covered with Octordle, where you solve eight words at once. And of course any Wordler worth their salt should be able to handle sixteen words, like in Sedecordle. And no, it doesn’t stop there:

Shortly after Wordle became an overnight sensation, a natural question arose: what’s the best guessing strategy? Many theories sprung up as people claimed to have found the optimal way to beat Wordle, often times using the word optimal loosely. While scrolling through the comments of one of these allegedly optimal Wordle posts I spotted a comment promoting a botting competition to see who could put their money where their mouth was.

Imagine the typical everyday scenario in which you have been imprisoned in the wine cellar of an evil combinatorialist. She promises to let you go, but only if you can solve her riddle.

Warning: Math, Handwaving

I spent a lot of time doodling in middle school in lieu of whatever it is middle schoolers are supposed to be doing. Somewhere between the Cool S’s and Penrose triangles I stumbled upon a neat way to fill up graph paper by repeatedly combining and copying squares. I suspected there was more to the doodle but wasn’t quite sure how to analyze it. Deciding to delegate to a future version of me that knows more math, I put it up on the wall behind my desk where it has followed me from high school to college to the present day.

Welp, I zoned out for another year. Luckily I’m pretty sure no one reads this stuff, except maybe CS 186 students who want to investigate the TA who answers debugging questions at 4 AM instead of teaching a discussion section. Which brings us to today’s topic!

“blursed (adj): Simultaneously blessed and cursed by a situation, object, person, etc…”

– Urban Dictionary

I recently discovered something incredibly blursed while reading an article by faehnrick in PagedOut Volume 2.

For those unfamiliar with the finer details of competitive Pokemon, it’s basically just a fancy version of rock, paper, scissors. While RPS gives each player 3 options, a turn in pokemon consists of around 4-9 possibilities for each player. Each player then reveals his or her choice simultaneously, and the results of their actions play out. This makes it different than games like Tic Tac Toe, Chess, or Go where only one player is “in control” at a time, and instead more like a game of Poker where two players are forced to reveal their hands at the same time.

Full title: This title consists of two a’s, one b, two c’s, two d’s, thirty-one e’s, six f’s, four g’s, eight h’s, eleven i’s, one j, one k, three i’s, one m, eighteen n’s, seventeen o’s, one p, one q, seven r’s, twenty-eight s’s, twenty t’s, four u’s, five v’s, six w’s, three x’s, four y’s, and one z.

For real! Test it out (or just take my word for it)!

While the previous class related post was on the first project of CS61A, this is skipping straight to the second project of CS61B. There were 4 or 5 projects in between the two, but my main problem with them was that for the most part they were nothing more than fancy fill in the blank exercises. This project changed up that format by giving a ton of freedom to the students in terms of implementation.

Picking up where we left off from Part 1, so far we’ve found a way to generate an optimal strategy for the game of Hog by recursively calculating which moves would be the best. While effective, it certainly wouldn’t have made for much of a contest if everyone who came up with this approach were tied for first. Luckily, the professor was likely aware of this possibility, and threw a wrench into the probabilistic method by forcing the strategies to work with incomplete information.

This is just a quick fix for a problem I ran into while trying to use Primitive on Windows. While trying to create a gif, you might run into a message like this:

writing test.gif
2018/06/08 14:07:20 exit status 4

The first project of my first CS class at Berkeley was to write the logic for a modified version of the dice game Hog. The game itself is pretty simple (roll die to score points, first to 100 wins), and the project was more a less just a warm-up to get everyone used to Python syntax and higher order functions. The extra credit option, however, was a bit more interesting.

Hello world! I just finished my first year at university, and I thought it would be neat to share some of the projects I undertook throughout the year somewhere, both personal and for classes. If you’re interested in anything you see or have any feedback, feel free to contact me at chriswong21@berkeley.edu.