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

[Violentvixen]

Redemption! I guessed this word a ton when this game started before I realized this info is in a sidebar of Wikipedia that's not part of the game.

Seriously I'm so happy it's finally useful.

 

[lincolnic]

10 for me today, which felt pretty good given that my first five guesses had 0 results, and I got it entirely off of biology at 9.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Oh man, today's might be one of the most fun I've seen in a while. Ended up with 66 guesses at 59%.

The time when I had uncovered both "in the Bible" and "sports" as categories and going what is definitively going to remain one of my most memorable Redactle moments ever.

 

[lincolnic]

This one was awful for me. 211 guesses (a couple of these were typos, so really somewhere around 207-208), 22.75% accuracy. I could not find a damn opening anywhere. Turns out I have no idea what fits into both sports and plot devices.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Wasn't great for me either - 124 guesses, accuracy 29.84%. I focused on religion since that was the only thing I was really able to suss out and follow up on.

 

[Yimothy]

200 for me. I had “in the Bible” and “as a plot device” but couldn’t find the common ground for a long time.

 

[lincolnic]

Today's was really, really tough. I knew what kind of thing I was looking for by around 70 guesses, but even with Wikipedia I didn't get there until 129. Woof.

 

[Paul le Fou]

Yeah, it took some real wiki digging to find the exact one they were looking for. Hope anyone else looking at today's is already a Biblical scholar or archaeologist of Levantine history!

 

[Yimothy]

I got it at 64 with the help of a list of semitic languages after trying every ancient Mesopotamian culture I could think of. I had heard of the answer, but I doubt I would have gotten it without looking it up.

 

[Violentvixen]

Silly one today. Uncovered the first word at guess 20 then just had a brain fart and couldn't figure out the second one. Finally got it at 35. I think my brain got messed up when matter (92) wasn't the second word.

 

[lincolnic]

I liked today's. I got there in 57, but it took me until about guess 40 to really start to zero in on what I was looking for. Honestly it wasn't until I got the second word at 56 that I knew what the first one was going to be.

 

[Yimothy]

16 for me. I was fortunate to guess physics at 2, got energy at 13, couldn’t think of anything so I put it away for a couple hours and when I came back I got it.

 

[lincolnic]

physics at 2

I also guessed this early (I often do) but it didn't seem as helpful in yesterday's puzzle as it usually is. Pretty low hit count.

 

[lincolnic]

Man. I could've had today's on my first guess, but instead of actually looking at the article first I wasted four guesses on other random three letter words. Then I actually scrolled down and saw that the word I was looking for was set, so I had it in 6 instead.

 

[Yimothy]

I got today’s in 8. Got the second word on guess six after figuring it was something to do with maths, got the first word on a vague feeling of it being associated with the second and no other words of the right length coming to mind.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I had people going on about how difficult and nonsensical yesterday's was, and how no one would have ever heard of it without it being part of your field research or whatever, so I was approaching it with caution. It took a hint about parentheses to realize the second word was "set," after which I immediately though "Oh, Mandelbrot set, cool" and got it. Womp womp!

 

[lincolnic]

Clearly no one in Paul's Redactle friend group is a Jonathan Coulton fan.

 

[Yimothy]

I got today’s in 8, but I used google which I really shouldn’t have needed to. My first guess was steel, which I got because I thought it was an alloy of a four letter element (iron) with a six letter element (carbon). If I’d looked closer at the abbreviations I’d have realised the six letter one had a two letter abbreviation so it couldn’t have been carbon. I thought of copper for the six letter element, but could not for the life of me think of zinc until I looked at a periodic table. Then I couldn’t think of the alloy - I got stuck on bronze, and though I knew there was another copper alloy with a somewhat similar name brass just wouldn’t come to me so I googled “copper zinc alloy”. Should have known.

 

[lincolnic]

On the other hand, it took me 200 guesses. Just couldn't get a foothold. Finally started guessing metals more or less at random.

 

[Yimothy]

8 again today. I saw the ”blank, blank” at the end of the first sentence and thought that might be “city, country” (or “city, US state”), and with “The blank” as the opening words I thought it was probably a building or river or some other kind of landmark. I had a couple of false starts, then noticed the bit in brackets in the opening sentence, the six letter language name and two letter middle word made me think of French and “de” or similar, which was correct, and then it was a matter of thinking of candidates that fit those ideas and had the right number of letters. I did use google to check how to spell it, but I’m not bothered by that.

 

[Yimothy]

Took me about 150 guesses for CRT yesterday. I’d have thought I’d have gotten that earlier. Today’s I kinda gave up on after about 90 and solved by looking up Ukrainian banknotes.

 

[lincolnic]

Another one-shot today. The opening paragraph looked pretty clearly like "head of a [thing], body of a [thing]" and then I counted out "mythical creature" before that, and then it was the first six-letter mythical creature I could think of.

 

[Yimothy]

I’ve been having some pretty good runs the past few days, including a one-shot yesterday, though with the help of my atlas - looking for a four letter city in a ten letter country on a seven letter sea. Today’s took 79. I got language at guess 35, my first proper hit, but I could only think of spoken/written languages, not programming, until I hit on code. Even trying that I was thinking it could be about encryption. Didn’t think of programming until seeing what code revealed.

 

[Torzelbaum]

I noticed parts of a hyphenated word that weren't redacted which allowed me to get "today's" in 6 guesses.

I wasn't as lucky with that place from yesterday - it took me 59 guesses and some googling to find it.

 

[Violentvixen]

Got it in 14! Noticed AT&T was not fully redacted a bit down in the article so that got me on the right track quickly.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I've been pretty irregular - stats show I've been doing just over 1/week on average (Today's is 162; my last three were #159 Frank Gehry, #154 Speech Synthesis, and #148 Mandelbrot Set). (There's no reason to spoiler past answers, right? You can't go back and re-do them by number, iirc?)

But I did today's, and I'm glad I did - I thought it was a pretty fun one that felt impossible at times but that I got without help in the end, which I ultimately feel pretty good about. I got it in 84 guesses, although definitely a lot were grammar and fill-ins (like I said, it's been a while). Although, I imagine at least one or two people out there use one of the title words as a common guess; interested in seeing the spread on this one.

 

[Torzelbaum]

I didn't do so good:
157 guesses, accuracy 52.23%

I never knew that the first word of that was related to anything else.

There's no reason to spoiler past answers, right? You can't go back and re-do them by number, iirc?

I thought you could do ones from the past on Redactle unlimited but it looks like I was wrong about that.

 

[lincolnic]

I somehow got today's in 15 guesses, which is shocking to me. I knew I was looking for something in early history Asia and got empire at 14, then I had to do some Googling for the knowledge gap.

 

[Yimothy]

I got it in eleven but used Wikipedia’s list of Hindu empires to do so. I give myself partial credit for figuring out which list to look at, I guess. I thought it was some kind of state from the start, and I noticed the letters of the title fit “Roman Empire” so I started with that, which was half right. Then I tried Aztec and Mayan before noticing a four letter word that was probably Asia. I struggled a bit to think of Asian empires with five letter names, but got Hindu, from which I tried Gupta and Nanda. At this point I was thinking only of the Indian subcontinent which had me a bit off track. I ran out of ideas and consulted the list.

 

[lincolnic]

I got another one shot today entirely from the first sentence, which I'm pretty proud of! I saw that the subject was a "[seven letter word] [four letter word] to [three letter word]", and I figured that the four letter word was either "made" or "used" since I knew the word after "to" had to be a verb. The first seven letter word I could think of that would be made or used to do something was "machine", and once I had that, I figured the three letter word was almost certainly "sew".