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

[RT-55J]

443 guesses with a 30.93% accuracy rate

that was awful

I figured out for certain that it was a legal concept by my 267th guess (after ruling pretty much everything else out, but it still took me nearly 200 guesses from there. Eventually I stumbled into the term "restraining order", and most of the rest of my guesses were trying to figure out the specific term that fell under.

 

[pudik]

• You solved it in 38 guesses
• Your accuracy was 78.95%

pretty good. a few wasted guesses, but figured it was a capital city by 26 and spent a few guesses without reading what i already had (common theme)

 

[Torzelbaum]

You solved it in 243 guesses
Your accuracy was 57.61%

I was eventually able to get to the point where I knew that it was looking for what's in pudik's spoiler but had to finally do a search to get the answer since I had exhausted my knowledge. (It doesn't help that I seem to often get confused about where that place is.)

 

[Violentvixen]

Whoof, two days in a row of things I don't know. Have I mentioned I'm bad at geography?

I uncovered that it was a city in Portugal (which I had to look up how to spell). Then I looked at my husband and said "well, I can't name a single city in Portugal so that's that". Looked up a map and recognized the city name, although if someone had said that name to me I would said it was in Spain.

So had to cheat and won't count today. Oh well!

 

[MrBlarney]

I got the ace on today's (#52, 2022-05-28) Redactle. The site will say 1/2, 50.00% though, since I accidentally fat-fingered a punctuation mark as I went to hit the Enter key.

Spoiler

I made a derivation of the opening sentence as:

title-6 (language-10: translation-6) is the capital? and the largest city? of country-8, with an estimated population? of (6-digits) within (3) (14) (6) in an area? of (3-digit.area).

which already narrowed things down a lot. Further down the page, I saw:

During World War II?, title?-6 was one? of the...

which made me focus my thoughts down to Europe or Asia. Lisbon was the best fit I could think of.

 

[Eishtmo]

100 guesses with an accuracy of 87.00%.

I got thrown off a bit thinking it was in one place, but it was off to the side instead. Much better than that nightmare yesterday.

 

[RT-55J]

I accidentally clicked on pudik's spoiler thinking it was for yesterday's puzzle (my fault (also, lmao)), so I can't say that I got this totally legit. Still, given the subject matter, I think my actual score would have still been within the ballpark of the 50 guesses that I got in.

 

[Yimothy]

I got it in 41, 85%. I figured it was a location before making any guesses, but for some reason I thought it was somewhere in western North Africa, which is not that far from correct. I was thinking region rather than city at first, once I hit on “city” at guess 40 it became pretty clear.

 

[gorha]

11 guesses, 100% accuracy. I had an idea of what kind of thing it was from the opening paragraph, and just took a few guesses to narrow it down (and my first guesses happened to be right).

 

[lincolnic]

36 guesses here. I also figured out what sort of thing it would be from the first paragraph, but it wasn't until I got city at 20-something guesses that I started trying to name eight-letter European countries.

 

[Dark Medusa]

24 guesses, 37.5% accuracy

Since I usually blindly go through some common terms (bad for accuracy) but again saw the subscript, figure it was something in the STEM field. Looked for the field, saw chemistry, checked for electrons... and finally typed the answer just seeing if it was in the article. At least I get to keep my chemistry card!

 

[Violentvixen]

I started typing the answer then deleted it because I thought it was too technical to be answer. Came back around to it and got it at 47, but should have had it at 30 or so, silly second-guessing myself.

High hit words were atom (23), element (15), number (18).

 

[lincolnic]

50 guesses here, not really anything special about this one to report.

 

[MrBlarney]

I'm on a two-day perfect streak, getting the 2/2 on today's Redactle (#53, 2022-05-29).

Spoiler

The opening sentence was a big help in getting the domain of the article:

In {category-9}, the {title-7} ({2} {8}) or {alt-name-7} ({7} {8}) of an {7} is...

I wanted that last {7} to be "element", so I guessed "chemistry" to be the first redacted word, and the second word in the title. Since that ended up being a hit, I decided to try and go for the ace. In the first section after the intro, I assumed an atom? as a phrase and found repeated instances of

in {?}, {?} has? a {title?-7} of {number?}

which made me try to narrow things down to 7-letter chemistry words related to elements and atoms, that did not begin with a vowel. (The word "isotope" originally came to mind, but that starts with a vowel.) Some kind of word that requires disambiguation. And then I went to lunch.

After coming back from lunch, I started looking at the puzzle again, and decided to kick in "valence". That fits the criteria, right? I wasn't fully expecting it to succeed and was going to pivot to standard strategies if it didn't. But hey, it worked out.

 

[gorha]

188 guesses, 63.83% accuracy. My first guess was one of the words in the title, and I spent most of the rest thinking I'd already tried the other before typing it "again" to highlight it. Derp.

 

[Violentvixen]

I'm on a two-day perfect streak, getting the 2/2 on today's Redactle (#53, 2022-05-29).

Spoiler

The opening sentence was a big help in getting the domain of the article:

In {category-9}, the {title-7} ({2} {8}) or {alt-name-7} ({7} {8}) of an {7} is...

I wanted that last {7} to be "element", so I guessed "chemistry" to be the first redacted word, and the second word in the title. Since that ended up being a hit, I decided to try and go for the ace. In the first section after the intro, I assumed an atom? as a phrase and found repeated instances of

in {?}, {?} has? a {title?-7} of {number?}

which made me try to narrow things down to 7-letter chemistry words related to elements and atoms, that did not begin with a vowel. (The word "isotope" originally came to mind, but that starts with a vowel.) Some kind of word that requires disambiguation. And then I went to lunch.

After coming back from lunch, I started looking at the puzzle again, and decided to kick in "valence". That fits the criteria, right? I wasn't fully expecting it to succeed and was going to pivot to standard strategies if it didn't. But hey, it worked out.

Nice. I really enjoy how you type the process out by the way!

 

[Yimothy]

I got 31 and 29%. I saw the “in <blank>” at the start and thought it would be a religion, philosophy, or science, spent a while getting nowhere on the first two of those, then hit on group, atom, chemistry, and valence.

 

[RT-55J]

11 guesses with 54% accuracy

I guessed from the structure of the opening paragraph that the subject was related to a specific branch of science/math. I managed to land on chemistry on my 5th guess. From there I guessed "element" since it seemed like a good starting point. With that narrowed down, I guessed "weight" (zero hits) and then "number" (18 hits) since I figured it was an elemental property of some sort. After that, I got a lot of hits for electron and electrons, which lead me directly to the answer.

Feeling extremely chuffed right now.

 

[Violentvixen]

May 30th- I am extremely surprised this ranks high enough in the top articles to be part of this game, it's not something I would consider common at all. My spouse gave up even after I gave him the hint below.

Hint if you get to the point where you know what it is but don't know the exact word: This word also comes up in computing/programming. More specific hint: Both this word and the computing word are named after the same person.

Anyway, 66, with pressure (25) being the key guess.

 

[DFalcon]

I was happy to get the ace today.

Spoiler

Early stages might be described as: what the heck are all these 1- and 2-character things floating around?
I had some thoughts about the subject maybe being a region or geographical feature (how many one-word category options do we have that start with "the"?) but couldn't get them to fit.

The {title-6} ({6}: {2}) is the {what can this be?-2} {7} {4} of {8} {4} to...

I could figure a bit of the etymology:
The {category-4} is named after {firstname-6} {lastname-6}, known?{actually "noted"} for his/her contributions to {13} and {12}, ...

Which helped a bit with the second sentence:
The {category-4}, named after {firstname-6} {lastname-6}, is {7} as {3} {6} per {6} {5} and is comparable?{actually "equivalent"} to {2} {5} ({2}) in the {3} {6}.

Though I did think that etymology sounded like a scientist, it was a while before I thought of "SI" as a candidate for the important 2-letter word, after which everything pretty well fell into place (especially since I happened to know the relevant first name in addition to basic SI units).

The unit, named after Blaise Pascal, is defined as one newton per square meter{actually "metre"} and is...

 

[lincolnic]

85 guesses here, which is a lot lower than expected. I had at least 50 guesses of straight nothing until I finally grokked that it was a unit of measurement. Then, like Violentvixen, I hit pressure at guess 58 and from there it was a question of cycling through names.

 

[RT-55J]

70 guesses, 28.57% accuracy

Not too bad. Again, figured it was science related from the beginning, but my early guess of chemistry turned out to be surprisingly unproductive. Around guess 62 I finally realized that the answer was some sort of unit, and things finally fell into place from there.

 

[MrBlarney]

Dropped my perfect streak on today's Redactle (#53, 2022-05-30), but that's no shame considering the diversity and difficulty of Redactle in general. Still managed a spectacular 6/8, 75.00% that I'm satisfied with.

Spoiler

You can see DFalcon's spoiler above for the broad strokes of the derivation, which was very similar to mine. I should have probably spent more time thinking about the named? after {6} {6}, since I didn't consider if it could be a person's name. So I blasted through my first two guesses of "moon" (maybe the amount at the end of the opening paragraph is the size of a celestial object?) and "book" (uhh... dunno) before moving on more reasonable guesses of the text.

Third guess "named" didn't get anything more than the expected blanks, and neither did "area". But "defined" as my fifth guess got not just the end of the opening section (defined as {6-digit.unit}) but a reveal in the second sentence (defined as {3} {6} per {6} {5}) that set me on the correct path. After that, I used "one" to check that my thinking was on the right track, and got the answer on my last two inputs.

 

[Yimothy]

96 for me. I had no idea for a very long time, hit on unit at 80 and it fell into place from there. I had strength revealed already and had no idea what a unit of strength might be, but once I got pressure I knew it. I actually use pascals all the time at work, though usually as kPa.

 

[Violentvixen]

May 31st- The word "considering" is uncovered by default? Also a random 3 near the bottom? And the final table/list, eek.

Okay wow this article is weird. The usage the vast majority of people would be familiar with this word is only briefly mentioned in the bullets and I am really shocked. There's also a lot of non-science uses of this word that aren't mentioned at all. Huh. 231, I guess I could have gotten there sooner but like I said I would have expected this article to have more focus on the more common usage.

Anyway, I got this because in bioengineering class we had to do a lot of modeling of how blood moves in blood vessels, including the effects of the answer. As I uncovered energy (50), viscosity (11), kinetic (14), fluid (38) and flow (78) I was getting more and more annoyed because I knew the previous spoiler was related to this but just couldn't hit on it. Also the mention of smoke threw me off, I was stuck on particle modeling and dynamics for a while.

Vague hint: You have experienced/felt this.

More specific hint: The most common usage of this word has to do with flight.

Even more specific hint: If you experienced this while traveling by air it probably made you uncomfortable/frightened.

 

[Torzelbaum]

I was able to determine the broad category of today's answer but couldn't remember the exact term or that it applied to that category so I had to look up the answer once I got close enough. (192, 40.10%)

Yesterday I got hung up on thinking it was related to some kind of award "named after" somebody and went off on a bunch of tangents. At one point partway through my guesses I had thought of guessing the answer but decided not to for some reason. But I did finally get back to that after a bunch of other guesses. (91, 15.38%)

 

[lincolnic]

Holy shit today's was hard. 289 guesses, 35% accuracy. I got flow at 169 and even then had to spend over 100 more guesses about everything I knew about liquids. I feel like I only stumbled onto the answer by random luck.

 

[RT-55J]

238 guesses sheesh

I figured it was yet again a science-y thing, but I struggled to latch on to any relevant keywords for a long time. Finally on guess 189 I found out for certain that the answer was in the field of fluid dynamics, which lead to most of the opening paragraph falling into place. Eventually I decided to google "laminar" since I had guessed that word and figured the answer was its opposite.

 

[Yimothy]

93. I spent a lot of guesses getting any idea at all, eventually had fluid dynamics, flow, and some other words in the opening paragraph, and was totally stumped on types of flow. Which is disappointing because laminar flow comes up all the time in my work and I could have figured out the contrast to it from there. Eventually I put in “air” and got the phrase “air flowing over it”, from which I was able to think of turbulence.

 

[Olli]

#55: got it in 122. I think I may have had my biggest streak of misses so far, and my accuracy was a hair under 40%. flow happened around 100 and after that things started to fall in place.