Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vitus 517 days ago
I am similarly less-than-impressed. If you click through to the website, you can watch the replay of one of the games mentioned in the article (the one with the clue "invader").

In that instance, the clues all matched 2-3 words, and the winning team got lucky twice (they guessed an unclued word using an unintended correlation, and their opponent guessed a different one of their unclued words.)

You also see a number of instances where the agents continue guessing words for a clue even though they've already gotten enough matches. For instance, in round 2, for the clue "Japan (2)", the blue team guesses sumo and cherry, then goes for a rather tenuous followup guess for round 1's 007 with "ring" (despite having gotten the two clued matches in the first round). A sillier example is in the final round, where the Red Team guesses 3 clues (thereby identifying all nine of their target words), then going ahead and guessing another word.

(For what it's worth, I think "shark" would have been a better guess for another 007 tie-in seeing as there are multiple Bond movies with sharks, but it's also not a match, and again, I wouldn't have gone for a third guess here when there were only two clued words.)

1 comments

This is allowed by the rules though. You can guess +1 to the number specified.
They know it's allowed. It's also terrible and non-sensical strategy in the specific cases that are described.