Why you can't stop playing Wordle, according to a computational linguist | University o... - 0 views
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Lara Cowell on 13 Mar 22Over the past few months, the online word game Wordle has skyrocketed in popularity, with cryptic grids of gray, green and yellow squares appearing on social media.The game is challenging, but simple: Once a day, players have six guesses to identify a new five-letter word (all players receive the same word on a given day). Each guess provides color-coded hints: a letter turns green if it is in the correct spot, yellow if it is part of the word but in a different spot, and gray if it is not in the word at all. In Wordle, the process of intuiting a target word from color-coded clues provides a window into our subconscious understanding of how language works, according to UChicago linguist Jason Riggle. In effect, it turns everyone into a linguist, forcing us to wrestle with sound fragments and stitch them together according to probability distributions.