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

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
I was doing these on my phone over the last week (usually remembering at bedtime instead of during breaks at work), but I've had some ups and downs.

#69: Go - 197 guesses, 59.39%
iirc, I had no fucking clue what was going on here. Words I'd get would almost all have 1-2 hits but in completely useless places. I was going down a legal road, and hit on "rule" and/or "rules," which led to "game" and I got it on the next one because how many 2-letter games are there

#70: liquid-crystal display - 49 (67.35%)
I think I went heavy on standard-filler words, and once I started guessing it came pretty easily. IIRC something led me to "gas," which I followed through states of matter as I often do, and "Liquid" gave it away.


#71: Marseille - 83 (67.47%)
Nothing special to say here. Once I narrowed it down to the category of "a city in France" I did some internet research to find the final answer.

#72: Prism - 180 (24.44%)
THIS motherfucker. This article had a frankly astonishing paucity of standard words in it. Not just the standard filler words, but categorical words for, like, anything at all. "Rainbow" was the word that tipped me off to the final chain of guesses, and I think I guessed that for pretty much no reason at all because I had nothing to go on by then.

#74: Robotics - 16 (68.75%)
Dunno what happened here, but for some reason I looked at the opening paragraph and my very first guess was "Autonomous" and got a hit in the opening paragraph. After a few misses barking up the "autonomous region/zone/state/area" tree, I looked it over again and that same first word led me to "Robot." Never even put in any standard/small-word guesses. Probably won't beat this for a while.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
June 20th- As soon as I determined that today's was a German philosopher I had low hopes of knowing the answer. Guessed every German name I could think of and uncovered the first (Max) and middle (Ferdinand) names but still had no clue. Ended up Googling with what I knew and found the answer but unfamiliar with it. Oh well, pretty pleased with how close I got.
Same here. I also did some wikicheating since the answer was not something I'd ever even heard of before. 119 guesses.
Me three. 71 guesses, 36.62%. I know these get obscure sometimes but I think this might be the most obscure I've ever seen by a pretty sizable margin.

I got philosopher on guess #41, and confirmed German (which I'd suspected since about 36) on #42. At this point I turned to the Internet. I spent guesses 43-70 trying every name I could find on the wiki page for German Philosophers, STILL didn't get it, googled the first line of text and was finally led to the correct page, which had a single link on the above main page I had managed to overlook. Jesus Christ.
 

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
I did google"cheat" once I had a broad idea but had exhausted my limited knowledge.
  • You solved it in 44 guesses
  • Your accuracy was 59.09%
 
I don't think of it as cheating. The topics are varied enough that if you do NOT know what it is you will never get it. Once I get a general idea of what the topic is, I definitely head for google. I also do that for spelling because I suck at that.
 

DFalcon

(he/him)
To my tongue-in-cheek shame, on #73 I went first for Tom and Jerry without spending the time to think that probably isn't on the list of important topics by the lights of whoever's gatekeeping this. When that failed, War and Peace came to mind quickly enough. 3/66%.

On #74 I missed some clues, but I'd heard of the FIRST Robotics competition and "first" tends to be one of my relatively early guesses. 25/92%.

#75 featured more Googling than I usually prefer to do. It seems a bit misleading to talk about getting the ace when, like everyone else in the thread, I didn't know the subject at all.
First sentence:
{first name-3} {middle name-9} {last name-7} ({6}: ; {birth date} - {death date}) was a {nationality?-6} {profession-11} known for his/her work in {long things}.

First sentence of second section (Life and {6})
{first name-3} {last name-7} was born in {city/locale-6}, {nation-7}, on {birth date}, to a...

A smattering of info from other sections:
Prevalence of two-letter pronouns suggests a "he" rather than "she".
{5} {3} {1} or World War I appears a couple times when describing his life (most likely lived through it).
Lots of titles (italics) at the end of the article. (I wondered about the pink text in this section; looking back, this is how it rendered {{cite note}}.)

I eventually guessed that our subject was German, as the only match I could think of for {nationality?-6} but {nation-7}. While I figured I was looking for something like a scientist or writer, none of the similar categories of people I actually know about fit {profession-11}. So I searched for famous Germans, added "Max" to the query as nearly the only 3-letter first name appearing in that list, and then found a philosopher in the right timeframe fitting Max {7}.
 
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RT-55J

space hero for hire
(He/Him + RT/artee)
289 guesses

Even after a couple hundred guesses, about all I knew was that the subject was a German dude and the the name "Pope John Paul II" appeared in the opening paragraph.

I read a hint in this thread that the subject was a philosopher, so from there I hopped to Google and was able to get the answer in two more guesses.

Never would have gotten this on my own.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
June 20th- As soon as I determined that today's was a German philosopher I had low hopes of knowing the answer. Guessed every German name I could think of and uncovered the first (Max) and middle (Ferdinand) names but still had no clue. Ended up Googling with what I knew and found the answer but unfamiliar with it.

This is pretty much my experience today exactly, minus Ferdinand.
 

lincolnic

can stop, will stop
(he/him)
44 guesses today. Took me 21 guesses to get to bird, and then a slightly embarrassing amount of time to think of five-letter bird names.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
74 guesses, accuracy was 54.05%

I was in the right general sphere from the start but it took me a while to get specific. I started out thinking it was an animal, but "animal" didn't have any hits, and I have yet again learned a valuable lesson about nonspecific words in wikipedia articles. I went through various types of plants, including fruit and vegetable, before coming back around to the idea that it was an animal. Another glance and I got a hit on my guess of male (and female, wasting a guess), I returned to an earlier thought that a bird article probably wouldn't include "animal" (if indeed any articles would). Last guess was bird, then straight to title word 2 followed by title word 1 all in short order.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
106, absolutely should have had this one sooner, I blame being full of hydrocodone. Got that it was a bird around 40-something, but swear I managed to guess every type of bird except robin, gah. Finally started thinking through various cards in Wingspan and got it. Silly.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
237, possibly my worst so far. I couldn’t think of robin for the life of me, and wound up looking it up (sort of - I skimmed the Wikipedia article for magpie because I thought there was a magpie-adjacent bird whose name I couldn’t remember). A lot of words that I thought would get hits for a bird did not, which threw me off a bit. Once the text was revealed I could see that I didn’t have the full article - it cuts off mid-sentence in the Vocalisation section. Is that normal and I just haven’t noticed before?
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
An astonishing 280 with an even more astounding 12.80% accuracy today. I didn't have a single clue what it was until guesses 208 through 210 where I got light, mirror, and optics right in a row, but it still took me 70 guesses to finally hit on focal which then immediately got me the answer.

I wonder if the article being so short had something to do with it. I'm... yeah, I'm going to say it was that.
 

lincolnic

can stop, will stop
(he/him)
Holy shit, today's was the worst Redactle I've ever done. I ended up with the answer at 128, but by 90 guesses I'd only had two hits (and each of those only had one instance each). I didn't get anything else until 120, then at 121 I managed to guess light, which brought me to lens at 127 and then finally the answer. Finished this one off with an absolutely stunning 4.69% accuracy.
 
I think I hate the short ones more than the long ones. At least you have a chance of any given word being in a long one, but these short ones you need the exact right word.
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
June 22nd- 59, feel like I could have gotten it sooner but okay with it, still going to blame the hydrocodone. But I loved photography with manual cameras growing up and microscopes (both light and electron) are my thing so this is a term that I use a lot. Object (2) at guess 13 didn't uncover a lot but sent me down the right path, and the fact that convex showed up but not concave made me take a step back. Words with many hits were light(10), mirror (12), point (16). Also I stupidly guessed focal instead of the answer as my second to last guess which was completely pointless, bah.

But agreed, in an article this short there are a lot of words that you'd expect to show up that don't.
 

Torzelbaum

????? LV 13 HP 292/ 292
(he, him, his)
today's was the worst Redactle I've ever done
It was the worst for me accuracy-wise but not so bad on the # of guesses. (But I do think I got a bit lucky with finding light early.)
  • You solved it in 44 guesses
  • Your accuracy was 13.64%
 

Violentvixen

(She/Her)
June 23rd- this one is bullshit due to formatting issues.

I had food (80) at guess 11 and saw several incidents of the answer formatted one way in the article that were obviously the answer so I didn't bother to guess borne (5) until I was desperate at guess 139. Pretty much gave up and just started throwing in terms I knew I would be in there (salmonella, encephalopathy, etc) because why the fuck not. Then at guess 187 thought about formatting and was furious to see the result.

So 187, but I really had it at in the late 30s early 40s. A reminder to think about the formatting part of things, but I think it's nonsense that the title is foodborne but food borne and food-borne are used in the article.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
34 guesses, 64.71%, I'm happy with this one. I got the short word for nutritious edible stuff at 28 after running through various trade products, plants, and then to animals, and honed in on word 2 of the title eventually I think by just following my thought track and by counting letters. I'm glad I was looking at the title when the idea came to me and I hadn't seen the instances of the word later in the article, so I avoided running into the same bullshit trap that gave VV trouble, because that sounds like bullshit indeed! D:
 

lincolnic

can stop, will stop
(he/him)
27 guesses here. I guessed "food" first, which was a great start, and then "safety" at my fifth guess got my mind onto the right track. "Poisoning" at guess 20 showed me that "food poisoning" was a synonym for whatever the answer was, and from there it was a quick jump to the end.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
171 with the help of google. I knew it was food poisoning, I had the second word in the title, but I just couldn’t get foodborne.
 
171 with the help of google. I knew it was food poisoning, I had the second word in the title, but I just couldn’t get foodborne.
similar to me, 121, but i had the second word at like 35. a lot of spamming related terms and stuff just to fill letters.

this one (79) was good though, 19 guesses. form was a good guess at 3 with shape at four. helped clear enough that got a basic feel, but then i kind of felt that the first line was about 4 states of matter (I think there was a similar one maybe a couple weeks ago or something)
 

lincolnic

can stop, will stop
(he/him)
15 guesses today, which felt good. Started with "science", then had a couple of hits on "earth" so I went on a slight detour through physics and space, hit "state" at 14, and then seeing "XXXXX-state" sealed it.
 

Paul le Fou

24/7 lofi hip hop man to study/relax to
(He)
59 guesses, 69.49%

I was on the right track for most of the time, but kept thinking about more specific examples that turned up a few hits each but kept me circling the outskirts. When I typed the answer I thought I was just guessing another clue, but then everything uncovered.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
50 for me. I maybe could have done a lot better with a bit more thought: I got almost immediately that the first sentence was X is one of the four something somethings, the others being A B and C, and if I’d really thought about what four types of things might fit in the letters available maybe I could have got it from there. Instead I went down a tangent - I hit on energy which got me into fuels, noticed what looked like (and was) re-entry and from there started into space stuff. I guess being such a broad topic there were lots of tangents to explore.
 

lincolnic

can stop, will stop
(he/him)
54 guesses today. I feel like I should've gotten this sooner, as someone who was raised Jewish, but rather than guessing "Judaism" I was trying to think of holidays or laws or other observances. Eventually I guessed "Reform" at 52, which is what flipped the switch in my brain.
 

Yimothy

Red Plane
(he/him)
87. I got law early on and spent a while going down that road in the direction of marriage and divorce. Eventually I hit on religion and religious, from there it was a matter of time, though I was stumped on different kinds of Judaism to guess for a while.
 
227

just not great for me. Was stumbling around, got the general idea in 100ish (guessed museum at 114, surprised at how few hits and didn't think of related words), but there are just so many terms in here and it's easy to go off on tangents (I tend to just spam words that won't help just to fill out the text). I'm actually surprised the average is as high as it is (140something), but it's really easy to just be taken off track, because the article is real long and covers a lot. I just couldn't think of the word at all, despite not being an uncommon term at all.
 
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