Redactle, the daily ████████-█████ ████████ puzzle

[Eishtmo]

28 guesses (would have been 27 if I could remember how to spell) with 71.43% accuracy. Very nice

This, That, Had, Not, Were gives lots of positive hits, but often gives you just enough figure out context later.

World and History are good, War works too. I like simple words. Left, Right, Less, More, Great, Large, Small. Directions like East, West, North, South usually get you something.

From there, it's more about looking for context. I say War is good because it usually lets me find World War I or II. Capitalized words become nouns, so then you can find things. South America, New South Wales, West Virginia, and the like stand out.

That said, I often don't get good runs, I guess a lot of simple words (One Two Three) so I get some forward momentum, but it often doesn't lead to a solution.

 

[RT-55J]

76 guesses. Not bad. It took me about 50 guesses to figure out it was an organization of some kinds and it started falling into place once I guessed words like nations, states, and countries.

 

[Yimothy]

133, though it probably would have been about 30 if organisation had been spelled correctly in the article given it was my 26th word, closely following world. Absolutely stumped on this until I remembered about American English, which is frustrating because I always remember to drop the u in words like labour.

 

[pudik]

27/62.96

World is generally in my first few guesses, so that helped. got stumped that it was organization rather than conference, for some reason.

 

[Dark Medusa]

133, though it probably would have been about 30 if organisation had been spelled correctly in the article given it was my 26th word, closely following world. Absolutely stumped on this until I remembered about American English, which is frustrating because I always remember to drop the u in words like labour.

That word is spelled organization in American English, I think, so that might be why?

 

[Mogri]

81 guesses, 95%. I knew the answer was a British author in the first dozen guesses, and I ended up looking up a list. Of course, now that I know the answer, I know that I was already quite familiar with the subject of the article, but at the time, I thought there was no way I was going to get it.

 

[MrBlarney]

Dangit, I got addicted to this. I never found the short simplicity of Wordle worth doing every day or sharing, with similar feelings for other games in the Thing-dle genre. I get that immediate approachability and understandability is a big part of what makes Thing-dle games so appealing and sharable, but it's not for me. (Though I will say that Octordle (8 simultaneous Wordles) feels like the right balance before the absurdity of 16 or 32 simultaneous games.)

Redactle, though, I get this. It tests my knowledge, and sometimes gives me something new about each day's article. After about a week of these, I'm starting to get a rhythm on strategy and approach. I still like making guesses that I know won't really help me in the big picture, but where I like seeing words fill in.

In any case, I'm posting to boast my 100%, 24/24 performance on today's Redactle (#43, Thu 2022-05-19).

Spoiler

Guessed 'she' and 'her' before 'he' and 'his'. After filling in a number of more common words, I went in on 'fiction', 'book', 'work' and 'works'. That gave me enough to infer "works for children and adults" in the opening abstract, along with "His works for children" before a list of titles. I'm not much of a literary person, but I went with the only author I knew with a five-letter first name and four-letter last name and got lucky.

I also had some pretty good games on the previous two days:
#42 (Wed 2022-05-18): 24/29, 82.76%
#41 (Tue 2022-05-17): 35/48, 71.92%

Redactle's pretty frustrating sometimes, and I have no qualms of going 'open book' past about 100 guesses. Sometimes your perspective got fixed, and you've overlooked the word that provides the correct perspective. Sometimes you just don't know enough, and it's okay to look things up if it helps you learn something new. That pursuit of knowledge this game provides is quite tasty.

 

[Eishtmo]

I wish they had a way to play older puzzles so I can practice strategies. There supposedly is a way, but involves inserting code and it's too much work.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Second day in the bag. I think I was in the 130s this time. I'm still not playing for a low number of guesses, it seems. I find myself guessing words that I know to a degree of certainty come next in a given sentence just to reveal them, even if they don't have any particular relevance to solving the puzzle. Like if "sisters and ________" came up, I'd guess "brothers" just to fill it in even if it offered no particular insight into the solution.

 

[Yimothy]

That word is spelled organization in American English, I think, so that might be why?

Yeah, that’s my complaint. I know the word as organisation and didn’t think of the American variant until a hundred guesses later.

Got today’s in 20 and 95%, but I’d accidentally read Mogri’s spoiler so I had a head start. I tried to do it as if I didn’t know that (like, I didn’t just immediately guess “British” and “author”), but it probably got me there quicker than I would have otherwise. I had “<blank>, the <blank> of the world” revealed, and got it from that.

 

[Violentvixen]

My final hint was me, and looking at the word counts knew it had to be "the Giraffe and the Pelly and Me" which is one of my favourites.

Anyway, 60 guesses, best words were stories (22) and book (24), technically also he (113) but that was a lame one.

 

[lincolnic]

52 guesses today, which I feel pretty good about, but my girlfriend got it in 12! She was pretty knowledgeable about the subject, though.

 

[RT-55J]

I figured around guess 30 (out of 74) that the subject was related to literature, but it took me a while longer to narrow it down. I'm not sure how, but my first guess as to who the author was ended up being correct (mostly based on the number of characters in the article title lol), though I had to Google the correct spelling for that.

 

[Kirin]

I ended up steered wrong because I managed to reveal the phrase "born in wales" near the beginning and got stuck on that country for a bit.

 

[Torzelbaum]

I ended up steered wrong because I managed to reveal the phrase "born in wales" near the beginning and got stuck on that country for a bit.

I never realized that he was of Norwegian descent.

 

[Mogri]

Well, "Roald Dahl" is hardly a British name.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Whoa... Might be a real easy one today (or not).

"You solved it in 10 guesses
Your accuracy was 100.00%"

 

[Paul le Fou]

You solved it in 13 guesses
Your accuracy was 84.62%

Global Median: 12.00 Guesses; 82.35% Accuracy
Global Average: 19.46 Guesses; 81.56% Accuracy

Yeah

 

[Torzelbaum]

Well, "Roald Dahl" is hardly a British name.

But could it be Welsh?

 

[Mogri]

3 guesses, 100%. My first thought was definitely "Sonic the Hedgehog," but that didn't fit.

 

[lincolnic]

58 guesses. How the heck do you folks get these in under 10?

 

[Torzelbaum]

I think today was a special case. My normal guess range is between 50 and 200. The extra word revealed in the title narrowed the possible context down a lot and when I just focused on that context I was able to get a lot of matches and information that when combined with my other guesses quickly lead me to the answer.

Maybe a dumb question but did you notice that or did you use your usual strategy?

 

[DFalcon]

58 guesses. How the heck do you folks get these in under 10?

Spending a lot of time trying to decode before making any guesses, for me sometimes some Googling, and for me it definitely only works sometimes (proper nouns are much more tractable). My friends and I approach Redactle this way out of habit from doing other puzzles which don't have the revelation mechanic, I think.

Spoiler: Detailed analysis for today

William the Conqueror

William I (c. 1028 - 9 September 1087), usually known as William the Conqueror and sometimes William the Bastard, was the first Norman king of England, reigning from 1066 until his death in 1087.

Some initial clues:

• Looks like we're dealing with Somebody the Epithet.
• The initial parenthesis section for people is basically always dates, with "xx month xxxx" style things typically pretty easy to pick out. Here it seems likely we are dealing with someone who is dead, and whose birth date is not precisely known, so though they lived in a time of 4-digit years it probably wasn't very recent.
• Unusual blocks like the one-character second word can be big signals. For a person, and especially Somebody the Epithet, it's hard to imagine what this could be except "I", "V", or "X" in the mostly-European monarch style.
• The title is likely to appear very early in some form in the first paragraph. Counting characters (easy to do in real Redactle) and looking for "the" in the middle, it seems to be the section coming after "as".

William(firstname) the Conqueror(epithet)

William(firstname) I(numeral) (c. 1028 - 9 September 1087)(period alive), usually known as William(firstname) the Conqueror(epithet) and sometimes William the Bastard, was the first Norman king of England, reigning from 1066 until his death in 1087.

Wikipedia likes to tell us certain things in the first paragraph. Our title coming after "five-letter-word as" makes that almost certainly "known as" with some descriptor like "also" or "commonly" preceding it. (While I'll mark these confidently here, one can continue without actually guessing them in the tool.)

William(firstname) the Conqueror(epithet)

William(firstname) I(numeral) (c. 1028 - 9 September 1087)(period alive), usually known as William(firstname) the Conqueror(epithet) and sometimes William the Bastard, was the first Norman king of England, reigning from 1066 until his death in 1087.

Continuing on things Wikipedia likes to tell us in the first paragraph: from the Roman numeral, we're pretty sure this is a king, queen, or maybe a pope or something. That's a huge aspect of why they're important so it will want to tell us that very early, as well as when and what they ruled, and we're not spoiled for choice. Some use of a two-letter word in later sentences (not pictured) also made me believe this is probably a "he" rather than "she".

William(firstname) the Conqueror(epithet)

William(firstname) I(numeral) (c. 1028 - 9 September 1087)(period alive), usually known as William(firstname) the Conqueror(epithet) and sometimes William the Bastard, was the first Norman king of England(kingdom), reigning from 1066(year) until his death in 1087(year).

We have a two-word phrase modifying "king". The first one is five letters. This is a bit less confident, but:

William(firstname) the Conqueror(epithet)

William(firstname) I(numeral) (c. 1028 - 9 September 1087)(period alive), usually known as William(firstname) the Conqueror(epithet) and sometimes William the Bastard, was the first Norman(ethnicity or dynasty name?) king of England(kingdom), reigning from 1066(year) until his death in 1087(year).

Eventually it can become useful that the topics are usually not obscure - I figured there was a decent chance the early seven-letter kingdom was England, and out of its better-known historical monarchs there's a clear fit.

 

[Yimothy]

I got this in 13, 84%, with similar thinking (much less detailed) to DFalcon. I initially guessed a couple of my usual words (getting zero hits or very few) without really looking at the text though, might have gotten it a bit quicker without that.

 

[RT-55J]

Once I knew the exact subject of the article, I had turn to google because I was having trouble with the second word. Turns out that "conquerer" is not the correct spelling.

 

[Violentvixen]

May 20th- Definitely embarrassed by my lack of knowledge of British history.

185, but I knew it was a king of england at guess 57 and just didn't know this one. I was just guessing random British king names but ran out of ideas, and Shakespeare didn't show up, "art, painting, song, carol, myth, legend" were all zero and man I had no idea. I'd even uncovered "was the first (blank) king of England" in the first sentence and had absolutely no idea what to put in the blank.

I thought William the Conqueror was Nordic and had absolutely no idea he was ever the King of England. I also thought the Normans were Vikings?

But didn't look anything up which I'm proud of. And I enjoyed reading the article about something I clearly don't know anything about, boy is Cnut a double-take of a name for a king.

 

[Olli]

#44 only needed 7 guesses from me, and it could really have been a hole-in-one

 

[pudik]

• You solved it in 113 guesses
• Your accuracy was 64.60%

i was going way off base here. Got stuff like United Nations delcaration of the elimination etc. and social justice etc. and went down a huge slide of unrelated topics. This is mostly highlighting how i should read more of what i unlock as i unlock it. I guessed law at guess 41, which unlocked a bunch of "in-law" that would have easily pointed me in the direction had I scrolled to it.

 

[Dark Medusa]

What the fuck

95 guesses, 62.11%

I found it the same way pudik did, found group, council... leading me to look into law, which grabbed blank-in-law and finally found my way.

 

[Violentvixen]

May 21st- 35, before guessing anything I knew the structure was from Latin: (something) in the opening sentence which got me on the right track. I guessed law (31) early and honed in from there based on the same paragraph noted above. The thing that made me go off track a bit was that term (17) had so many more hits than word (2) so I was assuming it was something less common.