(Reverse) Guess the Word Game

This is a simple "game" I wrote based off an old CGI script I had for my private web server. It was originally created to demonstrate binary search, but it's also quite a fun game in itself.

Instructions:

1. Think of a word in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, or Dutch, and then click on Start. Your word should be a common word, rather than a specific name.
2. You will be presented a word. Click on "Before" or "After" depending on whether your word is before or after the word shown according to the dictionary.
   • You should determine whether your word is "before" or "after" according to English-language collation, as described in the following bullet points.
   • Every character is a single letter. For example, the Spanish "ll" is considered two letters for the purpose of this game.
   • Punctuation like ' and - are ignored (they appear to be artifacts of the underlying dictionaries).
   • Accented letters (á, ü, œ, etc.) are equivalent to their non-accented counterparts, but words with accents are considered to be right "after" their equivalent word without accents. That means that, for example, the word "für" comes right after "fur" but before "furious."
   • The German ß character is equivalent to "ss", again, taking into account the above collation rules.
   • If the displayed word is a truncation of your word (e.g. your word was "computer" and the displayed word was "compute"), then your word is said to come "after" the displayed word.
3. Repeat this process for each next word.
   • If you made a mistake, press the "back" button on your browser or click the "Go Back" link. The generator script is idempotent and does not store any server-side state.
4. Eventually, you will see your word; typically, this will take 18 to 20 steps.
5. If you do not see your word, either you may have made a mistake or the word does not exist in the dictionary (e.g., it may be a proper noun, slang, or a made-up word).

Example:

Let's say that your word is "computer."

1. On the first screen, you see the word "nothing." "Computer" comes before "nothing" in the dictionary, so you would click "Before."
2. On the second screen, you see the word "bee." "Computer" comes after "bee" in the dictionary, so you would click "After."

Start - no JS

Please do not link directly to the above links as they are subject to change at any time. If you want to share this on Facebook, Twitter, etc., use this page instead.

Copyright 2018 Peter Jin. View this project on GitHub and GitLab.

Dictionaries from the wordlist packages from the Ubuntu package repositories.

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