Category: Puzzles
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Privacy puzzles
I contributed a database reconstruction attack demonstration to the book Practical Data Privacy by my colleague Katharine Jarmul. While we might think anonymous summary data is safe to share, this attack demonstrates it’s possible to dramatically reduce the search space for re-identification, in this case from half a trillion quadrillion possibilities to just one! My…
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Smarter Semantle Solvers
A little smarter, anyway. I didn’t expect to pick this up again, but when I occasionally run the first generation solvers online, I’m often equal parts amused and frustrated by rare words thrown up that delay the solution – from amethystine to zigging. The solvers used the first idea that worked; can we make some…
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Summertime, and the puzzling is made easier
In between beach trips and bike rides, I whiled away more than a few summer hours on puzzles I found in the various AirBNBs we rented. Returning home, I rediscovered a sliding tile puzzle with a twist called Asteroid Escape, where embedded asteroids prevent certain tiles sliding past each other in certain configurations. With 60…
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Synthesising Semantle Solvers
Picking up threads from previous posts on solving Semantle word puzzles with machine learning, we’re ready to explore how different solvers might play along with people while playing the game online. Maybe you’d like to play speed Semantle against an artificially intelligent opponent, maybe you’d like a left-of-field hint on a tricky puzzle, or maybe…
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Second Semantle Solver
In the post Sketching Semantle Solvers, I introduced two methods for solving Semantle word puzzles, but I only wrote up one. The second solver here is based the idea that the target word should appear in the intersection between the cohorts of possible targets generated by each guess. To recap, the first post: Solution source…
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Sketching Semantle Solvers
Semantle is an online puzzle game in which you make a series of guesses to discover a secret word. Each guess is scored by how “near” it is to the secret target, providing guidance for subsequent guesses, but that’s all the help you get. Fewer guesses is a better result, but hard to achieve, as…