[noxvilleza]

That approach works well for a game like [Codewords](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codenames_(board_game)) where you're trying to find a single-word common hint between many of your words (that doesn't hit any of the other words).

My feeling is that it'll struggle with word-plays in OnlyConnect/Connections (like missing letters, added letters, words-within-words homophones, etc) as well as two-step references (such as {Venice, Dream, Night, Nothing} => "last words of Shakespeare plays"}).

[furyofantares]

Does it?

I thought it would. But I've spent a fair bit of effort both using embeddings and also using prompts to GPT4, as well as combinations of the two approaches, to try to make a good spymaster for Codenames with essentially zero success.

I wonder if something like https://wordassociations.net/en might be better for it than embeddings.

[noxvilleza]

I was playing a bit with embeddings in 2021. I'd played codenames online with friends in lockdown and we often had interesting boards we'd talk about, so when I saw papers like this (https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05885) I looked into the topic. I found the suggested clues were very good, and there were some 'clue scoring' functions which correlated with the actual best spymasters. Wasn't scientifically rigorous as OPs post, but I would say it was good.

[benpacker]

Ah wow, I'm not a frequent player so I didn't know how clever it can get!