50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell We are delighted to note that a version of the word game the New York Times bought for seven figures can now be played via a 50-line Bash script. GitHub user "huytd" uploaded the code initially as "less than 50 lines of Bash", although once others got stuck in the script size stood at the magic half century. By our reckoning, …
I prefer ZZ ... However, here's a short list:
:w to write, :w! to force a write, :q to quit (with prompt to save changes), :q! to force quit with no save, :wq or ZZ to write and quit, :wq! to force a write and quit. Note that ZZ doesn't need the :, nor does it have an option to force a write if you're editing a so-called "read only" file, making it somewhat safer than :wq! in day-to-day life.
HTH
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> We'll also draw a discreet veil over the likes of Sweardle, a four-letter guessing game that is as potty-mouthed as you would expect.
I'm disappointed.
Really struggled with it, couldn't think of a 4 letter swear word that ends with E.
The answer was "lube" - I don't care what you do with it, that's not a fucking swear word
Wordle is basically a hangman variant, of which there must be many versions in almost every programming language out there – in Haiku you can even play hangman in the kernel debugger! But the NYT has bought the brand and copyright, and that's what will be the target of any enforcement actions.
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One of their more famous articles, that got copied over here, was the exclusive on how O'Barmy had given Sweaty Gordon a load of DVDs he couldn't play ('cos you can't have a multiregion player in the USA, they don't exist - obviously).
Considering that, those words probably deserve the higher rate of pay.
Then again, as every British paper repeated that load of cobblers verbatim, the NYT mob aren't the really dumb bastards here.
Replying to one's own comment seems bad form, akin to quoting one's own poetry. But the edit window's closed, so here we are.
The readme that accompanies linux.words is quite enlightening, and reveals myriad sources that any scrabble player would bristle at. Fortunately, scrabble word lists abound on the internet, and bring the list down from 25105 words to 12972 (based on what's in fedora 35's list and the 2019 Collins list I grabbed). Caveat: you may have to dos2unix the list before it works as a replacement.
That's why I just adjusted wordle.sh to use the previously downloaded wordlelist instead.
EDIT: Or at least that's what I tried.
Any idea why changing
words=($(grep '^\w\w\w\w\w$' /usr/share/dict/words | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'))
to
words=($(grep '^\w\w\w\w\w$' /home/manolo/Games/words | tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'))
results in the game no longer functioning?
What you will want to do is use the limited list from Wordle to pick the words from, but an extended list of words (/usr/share/dict/words) to check your guesses against.
Otherwise you'll be typing perfectly valid guesses and the script will tell you they are incorrect and not give you any information.
Let's see if my bash skills are sufficient to achieve that....
"You know that, I know that and the NYT legal department know that. Will that stop them though?"
If only there were a hyperintelligent evil genius with a classy assistant [1] (and optional fluffy white cat, dammit, I was sure there was a fluffy white cat on the cover pic) somewhere, who could take appropriate corrective action…
[1] Of course, it's entirely possible that the well-groomed smartly-dressed bearded gentleman was really just a diversionary, uhh, beard, and the glamorous East Asian lady was, after all, the real genius/assassin behind the operation…
Rumours that her custom-built banking software installed around the world had anything to do with the 2007-08 financial crash are neither confirmed or denied.
There's a "The Laundry" book (Charles Stross), where there are some confusions about who is the "Bond" and who is the "Bond Girl" - worth a read :-) The books are a crossover between spy novels and Lovecraftian mythos, with a twist (and a dose of bureaucrcy, they are working for the government after all).
Also the main character is Bob Oliver Francis Howard, and his junior assistant is Peter Frederick Young.
Apparently, however, Simon Travaglia is not Charles Stross despite his name translating as "Witness to Troubles". If it is true that this is not a pseudonymous false identity, it's definitely one of the strongest cases of nominative determinism that I've ever seen.
The artwork, music and software are protectable with copyright. The game mechanics might be copyrightable but if that is possible then the rights belong to the creator of the word variant of mastermind from decades ago.
Prior art is a term from patent law. I have no idea if game mechanics can be patented. Depending on jurisdiction, the prior art may not be a problem: some jurisdictions specifically legalise ripping off other people's ideas if they go with "first to file a patent". Other jurisdictions go with "first to invent" so a patent can be ruled invalid with prior art and a large pile of money.
Software is a branch of mathematics so it is not patentable subject matter according to WIPO. The implementation is protected by copyright but not the idea. In theory someone can legally create their own implementation and distribute it. Patent offices are skilled in ignoring patent treaties and will grant patents for the idea for some software. In the EU you have to call a software patent a "computer implemented invention" in the filing but you don't even need to pretend in the US. Although software computer implemented invention patents are granted they may or may not be valid. That does not matter at all as the cost of litigation convinces many defendants to settle without a fight.
The mighty Wikipedia claims that all countries now use a "first-to-file" system. Canada, the Philippines and the USA have all switched, apparently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_invent
The USA (which I thought was still first-to-invent as well) switched in 2013.
Even in first-to-file countries patents can still be ruled invalid with prior art (and money), since an invenstion must be novel to be patentable. An example in the UK (a first-to-file country) would be Windsurfing International vs Tabur Marine, which you can read about at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Chilvers
There's been a TV game show 'Lingo' based on the same principles since 2020 already here. It doesn't stop at 5 letters, but increases the length as the player gets further. Hardly makes Wordle a unique game anyway, unless you use the Apple definition and add the magic words '...on a mobile device'.
Prior art? Just take "game where you guess a combination of symbols after being told number of correct symbols in correct it incorrect place after each turn" and add the magic formula "... on a mobile device" and you've got a new "invention" ... though there is prior art for this idea so might get sued for doing that
As someone with published photographs, videos and books (some of which are commercially available) I thoroughly support dropping copyrights to 12 years, extendable by fee to 20. Then stop. Public domain, and have at it.
It is great to have this programmed so effectively. It uses the /usr/share/dict/words
database of words. I just tried it out. It did not recognize words
like Maser or Aleph. The simplicity of the game will make it hard to
protect from copying as it is essentially the mastermind game with
a different alphabet and a restricted set of 370 thousand words. Which gets
me back to /usr/share/dict/words. On my linux machine, that file contains 102
thousand words and these are also shorter and longer ones. So, the Bash
game is much more restricted than the actual wordle game.
The wordle-word-list has 2316 entries. Reading the discussions on Github tells me that the /usr/share/dict/words list contains in fact too many words, many of which are actually... let's say the sources of what is considered a word are disputable.
The thread (in this forum? in the github discussions?) suggests looking for a scrabble word list and use that.
And you might want to make sure your line breaks are configured correctly, apparently CR and LF are too much for the ElReg forum.... ;)
I hadn't heard of Wordle till yesterday, but as far as I can see it's just the old "Word Mastermind" game from the 70s, played in easy mode.
Readers will recall that in easy mode you get a black pin in the position of any correct letter in the right place and a white pin in the position of a correct letter in the wrong place. In standard mode the black and white pegs were sorted in order, so you didn't know which applied to each letter.
Any patent attempt in the UK should die instantly of prior art.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5662/word-mastermind
"reforming copyright more generally to make it more fit for the age of the metaverse and the iPhone rather than Telex and Teletext."
Considering the lifespan of the vast majority of computer games, or software in general, maybe the copyright could be reduced to 10 years, or even 5. If it's still viable as a program after that, or has spawned a series/franchise/whatever, then the copyright holder gets first dibs at a 5-10 year renewal for a fee. After all, if it's still generating revenue, then a renewal fee every 5-10 years ought to be no hardship for the copyright holder. For that matter, why not apply that across the board? If the IP has value for life of author + 70 years, then it's valuable enough to incur a renewal fee. If not, then let it lapse into the public domain. Possibly retain the the rights for use in other media, eg old books, no longer in print thus generating no income, but later being used as the basis for a TV show or film.
For my first year project at University, I wrote a program to replace the APL special characters with mnemonics so that they could be printed on ordinary line printers, The original version, which I wrote like a normal programming language, with a loop or two (the ultimate no-no in APL) was several hundred lines long and took a significant part of my weekly computing budget to run.
After learning some more APL, I reduced this to about a dozen lines, plus some pre-made data structures containing the mnemonic strings (which took more time to create than the program, and actually was created with a program larger than the main one). The actual code that did the work was just two lines, and ran about as fast as the terminal could print the prompt.
When I submitted it for marking, I was told that it was really too short to be a valid project and got marked down for it. And I thought that the purpose of the project was to be a learning exercise, which I actually demonstrated in the project by writing up almost all of the journey I had been through creating it! And it worked.
If I remembered enough APL, I might actually have accepted the 3 line APL challenge, but it was a long time ago.
In case you ask what University taught APL. it was Durham, which I attended between 1978 and 1981.
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