19 March 2007
In the Lexigame Forum, regular player mymermaid has asked if the percentage of words found has increased since the shuffle option was introduced. She says, "I am sure that my percentage is much higher." Other players have also said the ability to shuffle the letters has helped them find extra words.
In the period from the start of the year till the introduction of the shuffle, on 23 February, the average percentage of standard words found by all players was 55.7%. Since the shuffle function came in, the average has been 57.1%. If we restrict our calculations to registered players (to eliminate the impact of one-off "anon" players who submit a couple of words and then depart), the percentage found this year was 60.9% before the shuffle, and 62.3% since.
These increases don't seem large enough for us to say the shuffle function has had a definite effect. We may need to wait until more data are available.
The following graph shows the percentage of standard words found by registered players in daily Standard and Challenge puzzles so far this year.
The shuffle function came in on 23 February.
But maybe shuffling helps especially in finding the "big" words? Here the evidence looks a little stronger. Among registered players, the percentage of nine-letter standard words found before the shuffle was available was 65.2%. Afterwards it was 2.5% higher, at 67.7%. (Although the lowest success rate for the year was a few days after the shuffle came in, when only 32% of players found GEARSHIFT.)
Of course the slight impact of the new option on players over-all does not rule out the possibility that some players, like mymermaid, have been able to use the new feature to their advantage. In fact, the success rates might continue increasing over time, as more players discover the usefulness of the shuffle.
What has been your experience? You can have your say in the Forum.
23 February 2007
Chihuahua has had another upgrade. The newest features are:
As always, we'd love to hear any comments on these changes. Go to the Lexigame Forum or send a message from the Contact Page.
15 December 2006
Some new features have been added to Chihuahua. Try them out!
The main change is that you now have the option of registering a player name and password, so you can sign in from any computer and continue your previous game. You can still play without registering if you prefer, but registration is simple and free, and should put an end to those vanishing-words blues!
Check out the details on the Help page.
If you don't register, you can play under an unregistered player name, as in the past - just type your chosen name in the "Your name" field and start playing, leaving the password blank. But if you don't register, you won't be able to play the same puzzle on different computers, and you may have trouble retrieving your words even on the same computer. Also, an unregistered player has no guarantee that someone else won't start using their name.
As the number of registered players builds up, we are planning to start up a comment board next to the puzzle, so players can exchange remarks as they play.
We're also planning a system that will let you send friends a link to a random puzzle that you're playing, so they can play too. You'll be able to set up your own private competition.
Another change we have in mind is to introduce a new puzzle type where only the words from the standard vocabulary would go on to the scoreboard. The focus would be on trying to find every single possible word from the standard list, rather than getting an astronomical score by finding lots of extremely rare words.
Please let us know if you have any problems with the site. We have tried to test all the changes thoroughly, but it's always possible a few bugs may have snuck in. And let us know your thoughts about the new features, and other things you'd like to see in the future.
25 October 2006
The Chihuahua word puzzle is back at http://chi.lexigame.com after an absence of about a week.
The problem was a complicated foul-up with the registration of "lexigame.com" as our domain name. The principal cause of things going wrong was a high level of disorganisation in the company we were using for domain registration and web hosting services. Once the site went off the air, we possibly made things worse with panicky attempts to solve the problem by transferring to a different provider. For a while, we seemed to be in a bureaucratic black hole where the domain name couldn't be transferred because it was expired, and it couldn't be renewed because there was a pending transfer!
Anyhow, we are back to normal now, and using a different service provider, so we hope things will run smoothly from now on.
While the site was down, there was no obvious way for would-be players to contact us to find out what was happening, since the email addresses given on the website all use lexigame.com. Despite this, a couple of keen Chihuahua-ites did manage to track us down and get messages through - one by email and one by mobile phone. After the problem had persisted for a few days, we sent an email to players who had written to us at some stage, giving a temporary address for the Chihuahua site, and a working return email address. One player wrote back:
Oh thank God! The withdrawal symptoms have been awful (uncontrollable shaking, sleepless nights, re-arranging the letters on our mailbox). Seriously, though. Thanks for the mail. I really love your game, and was worried that you wouldn't be able to continue it.
Thanks for all the encouraging messages. And please accept our apologies for any disappointment caused by the site's absence.
The promised upgrade to the game will be put on hold for a while, to avoid any risk of further disruptions to your playing enjoyment.
11 July 2006
The millionth word found in the Chihuahua daily puzzles was played in the Standard puzzle for last Friday 7 July. This was the one with SIMPERING as the 9-letter word. The millionth word was, in fact, SIMPER.
The Chihuahua website started last September with one puzzle each day. In December, the Challenge puzzle was added.
The 505 daily puzzles appearing up to and including Friday contained 50,990 possible words. So on the average, each word was found by 20 players. There were 17,854 different words among the 1,000,504 words found.
Here are some other facts and figures. (These do not include random puzzles played on the Web page.)
Thanks for playing over the last nine months, and thanks especially to those who have sent in comments and encouragement. There will be further improvements to Chihuahua in coming months, so stay tuned.
6 June 2006
From the reports received about players' words disappearing, it is apparent that not everyone realised that the only games saved are the ones for the latest day. If you are playing today's puzzle (Standard or Challenge) and you leave the website, your words and score should be saved. If you come back to the Chihuahua site later that same day, you should be able to resume playing from where you left off. And if you come back the next day to check the results and see how everyone else did, you should be able to see which words you found.
But if you play a previous day's puzzle, or add words to a puzzle when it is no longer the latest puzzle, these words are not saved and the scoreboard is not changed. (And if you are playing a puzzle at the time of day when a new day's puzzle appears, at a certain point your words will stop being saved.) In effect, the puzzle is frozen once its day is over.
Another thing that can stop your words being saved is looking at the solution. When you look at the solution (which you can do only on the Standard puzzle), it's assumed you've finished playing. You can keep playing after looking at the solution, but the additional words you play won't be saved and, of course, your total on the scoreboard won't go up.
Having said all that, there still seem to be a few unexplained vanishing word incidents. The cause is probably something to do with the "cookie" files on players' computers, but we have not been able to discover exactly what is happening in these cases. However, the good news is that a better way of saving games is coming! We will soon be introducing an optional player registration system. This means that, if you want to be certain of being able to retrieve your games, you can get a password that will allow you to sign on whenever you play, on any computer.
5 April 2006
I don't quite know how to break this to you, but there will be no Chihuahua Assist tool to find words for players, as announced a few days ago. The tool, as described, would have allowed desperate or lazy players to get a range of "assistance". At the maximum level, the computer would play a perfect game for a player without the player having to find a single word by their own efforts. This was in fact an April fool's joke.
I don't know how many people realised it was a joke, but the only players to send in comments seem to have been taken in, and questioned the wisdom of this innovation. At least nobody said they thought it was a good idea. (I don't like to contemplate the possibility that all those who didn't comment are looking forward to the new scheme!) Here are some of the comments received (names withheld to avoid any embarrassment):
Chihuahua assist will ruin the game.
I don't think giving help is such a good idea - it seems less challenging than using your own knowledge!!
...what's the point of allowing the program to enter for you
...if you can just select an option and shoot to the top, it kind of defeats the purpose of the game doesn't it?
Indeed it does, and perhaps it says something about the current state of the online games industry that people could seriously think such a scheme would be planned.
Of course the inspiration for the hoax was the recurrent complaints about cheating in Chihuahua. The Chihuahua Assist tool would have been a tool for cheating. I know some players cheat, because a couple have written in admitting to cheating at times. The question this raises is "Why bother?" Why are some players so keen to (seem to) do better than a bunch of people they don't even know? The April fool's hoax was meant to highlight this question.
However, I'd like to suggest that cheating in the Chihuahua puzzle is not as widespread as many suspect. The fact is that some people are just very good at making words from a collection of letters. This could come from a combination of a very large vocabulary, a natural aptitude and years of practice at playing word games and puzzles. (If you read the book Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, by Stefan Fatsis, you will learn about people who spend hours every day memorising lists of words that most people have never heard of, and practising with anagrams, etc. Maybe some of our top Chihuahua players are lifelong Scrabble or crossword fanatics.)
Some analysis of the records of past Chihuahua puzzles lends weight to the belief that the best scores are generally achieved by honest effort. The highest scores are often built up over a period of several hours, with the player coming back to the puzzle at intervals to make additional words. The words are not played in strict alphabetical order, as you might expect if they had been obtained through some external assistance. In fact, the earliest words to be played tend to be the more common ones, just as you would expect from any player relying on their own efforts.
One player suggested the solution should not be available until the next day. Well this is exactly what happens in the Challenge puzzle. Obviously some players (or one player anyway) didn't realise that there are two different puzzles available every day. Just press the tab labelled "Challenge" at the top of the game area. You can read about the differences between the two puzzles here and here.
The controversy also inspired some criticism of the more unusual words allowed in the puzzle. I can understand people's bewilderment - there are many words in our largest word list that I've never heard of, and some of them are hard to find in any dictionary. This list, known as YAWL, was not created by me, but it was designed for use in word games and I rely on the judgement and research efforts of its compilers. However, there could be some merit in introducing a third daily puzzle, that would be limited to a more widely-used vocabulary. Any thoughts? (I promise this one is a genuine proposal.)
Finally, if nothing else had alerted readers to the satirical intention of the Chihuahua Assist announcement, I thought perhaps the nine-letter word in the animated illustration might have been a tip-off: AMORALITY. This was, as it happened, a piece of pure synchronicity. I rigged up a version of the game that would play automatically, brought up a random puzzle, and that was the big word that appeared! Spooky, hey?
1 April 2006
A powerful new tool is about to be added to Chihuahua. Called Chihuahua Assist, it harnesses computer technology to help you improve your scores. Available on all puzzles, the new feature has been designed in response to concerns expressed by many players about the inequitable distribution of scores.
It has been claimed that some players with extremely high scores have obtained "assistance" of various forms in finding huge numbers of words. Well now everybody will be able to get assistance.
Chihuahua Assist will let you choose from a range of graded power-ups:
played for you automatically, sending you straight to the top of the board! (Until someone
else clicks "Help me to the max"). Of course when you're in a hurry, you can select this option
right at the beginning and skip over all those other time-consuming steps.Before we implement this major enhancement, we want to hear from you.
What kind of assistance do you want?
How can we improve your score-winning experience at
the Chihuahua web site? Send us your ideas and we'll see if we can implement them!
Watch this space for further announcements.
14 March 2006
Recently the nine-letter word in the Standard puzzle was NEOLOGISM, a word which was apparently new to many players (so to speak) as only 11 out of 63 players found it. It's been suggested that NEOLOGISM is too rarely-used to be a good choice for the nine-letter word. Similar criticism has been levelled at a few of the other nine-letter words in past puzzles.
It's been my aim to avoid the more unusual nine-letter words when generating puzzles. Ideally the finding of the big word should be a test of how good players are at seeing a word that is well known to them in a set of jumbled letters, rather than a test of enormous vocabulary size. (Of course this doesn't rule out the possibility of a second nine-letter word that is less well-known, but there should be at least one nine-letter word that is not too rare.)
Before Chihuahua went live, friends testing an early version complained about words like FORSYTHIA (a shrub) and GUILLEMOT (a sea bird). In response to these comments, the seed list was purged of quite a few obscure words. But maybe not enough.
Incidentally, some puzzles published in newspapers are guilty of using very unusual words at times. In recent months the "Target" puzzle in the Melbourne Age has used as its nine-letter word: FURCATION, VULNERARY, NEWMARKET, CREAMWARE, MEDICABLE, TRACKLIST, NODULATED and SADDLEBOW. None of these are in the list of nine-letter words used for generating Chihuahua puzzles.
NEOLOGISM was found by only 17% of the people who played that puzzle, which makes it the least-found primary nine-letter word in the history of Chihuahua. (Disregarding the first day the puzzle was live, when only eleven people played, of whom only one found the nine-letter word, which was, appropriately enough, OBSCURELY.)
Other nine-letter words that were found by few players include PANTHEIST, EUCALYPTI, POSTNATAL, TEDIOUSLY, LANDOWNER, ALBATROSS, COCHINEAL, REVULSION and DISAVOWAL. Of these, PANTHEIST, EUCALYPTI and COCHINEAL could probably be classed as rarely-used. The others seem, to me, to be fairly well-known words that just happen to be hard to spot. At the same time, some words that seem fairly uncommon were found by the majority of players - for example PRIVATEER, ROUNDWORM, SPLURGING, MULTIPLEX, PHEROMONE.
Perhaps there's a need to differentiate further between the Standard and Challenge puzzles. The main nine-letter words for the Standard puzzle could be chosen a bit more selectively, to exclude the likes of NEOLOGISM and COCHINEAL. On the other hand, the nine-letter words in the Challenge puzzle could be drawn from a somewhat wider group, allowing more unusual words to appear from time to time. What do players think?
Incidentally, the nine-letter word that was found by the biggest percentage of players was BREAKFAST (an everyday word, you could say), found by 90% of players. The word that was found most quickly, by those who found it, was BUTCHERED, the 5th word found on average by the 84% of players who found it. The word that took longest to find was PERMEATED, on average the 47th word found by the 38% of players who found it.
Perhaps the sign of a good nine-letter word would be that it is found by most players, but it generally takes them quite a long time. For example, BEDSPREAD was found by 69% of players, but only after, on average, 28 other words were played. Some other words like this in past puzzles are POINTEDLY, HOUSEMAID, FORESTALL, DISPARAGE, REPLAYING, INTERCEDE and SNAKEBITE.
22 February 2006
From now on, the Challenge puzzle will be somewhat more difficult, on the average, than the Standard puzzle. This will apply to random puzzles as well as the daily puzzle. There's no guarantee that the Challenge puzzle on any given day will be harder than the Standard puzzle for that day, but over time, the Challenge puzzles will offer more challenge.
The main change is simply that there will be more words to find. The average target for "Best" will go up by about 15, from 36 to 51, and the other targets will go up accordingly.
The other change is that nine-letter words ending in ING will be used much less often, as these tend to be easier to get. (Though not always. Way back on 12 October last year, only 5 players out of 21 got GESTURING. And only one got a second nine-letter word from the same letters.)
This is probably just the first step in differentiating the two puzzles. We have other ideas in mind for making the Challenge puzzle harder, but we'll wait and see how this change is received first. And for those who like Chihuahua just the way it is: fear not! The Standard puzzle is unchanged, and we plan to keep it that way.
As always, we'd like to hear your views.
27 January 2006
If you play both the Standard and Challenge puzzles from time to time (as many people do) you may have wondered if there is any difference in how the puzzles are set. Is the Challenge puzzle designed to be harder, or take longer, for instance?
Well, the answer is no, at present. But maybe there should be a difference. I'd like to know what some regular players think.
Currently, every puzzle is constructed from a randomly chosen nine-letter "seed" word. The seed words have been pre-screened to eliminate the more obscure words, as well as words that are spelled differently in different parts of the English-speaking world (e.g. words ending in "IZE" or "ISE"). A further restriction is applied so that the total number of words that can be made will be neither very small nor very large.
Consequently, there is no systematic difference in the difficulty of the two types of puzzle. Since Chihuahua started four months ago, the targets for "Best" in the Standard puzzle have averaged 35.4. Since the Challenge puzzle started almost two months ago, its average Best target has been 35.3. The average Maven targets have been 56.3 (Standard) and 57.0 (Challenge).
But perhaps things would be made more interesting if the puzzle-construction rules varied between the two puzzle types. So, the Challenge puzzle could have more words on the average, or more obscure words, or more long words. Or the nine-letter word could be allowed to be more obscure.
What do you think? Use the Contact page to send in your ideas.
4 January 2006
Did you know you can play Chihuahua using the keyboard instead of the mouse? This has always been a feature of the game, but now it has been enhanced by allowing you to use the backspace key to correct mistakes. A while ago dino wrote in saying, "Please could we have a backspace option, especially for correcting typos!" Well, dino, this is for you! (And all the other fallible keyboard players.)
To start playing via the keyboard, just type the word you want to make. The letters should fly into place. When you've finished typing the word, press the enter key. It's that simple! This should work in most browsers. (Unfortunately, it doesn't work in Opera.)
You can correct errors one letter at a time using backspace, or send the whole word back by pressing the left arrow key. (Note, this is changed from the up arrow key, as it makes more sense with the current layout of the game.)
Some Web browser software treats backspace as a shortcut for the browser back function - that is, it takes you to the previous Web page you visited. So be careful you don't press the backspace key unless you have just been building a word via the keyboard, or you might find yourself unexpectedly transported away from the Chihuahua site.
Of course, you can still play using the mouse, and correct errors by dragging the letters. To rearrange the letters, move letter tiles to where you want them. To remove a letter, drag it away from the rack and release the mouse button. To send all the letters back, press the Clear button to the right of the rack.
6 December 2005
An anonymous player wrote: 'IMPUNE IS A WORD, to go without punishment. Look it up. It should work on Monday's puzzle, but it comes up "Is not known"'.
It seems "impune" is indeed a word - an adjective meaning "unpunished". (Not to be confused with "impugn", meaning to question the honesty of. "Impune" is what you are when you act with impunity.) Though described by the Oxford Dictionary as obsolete, and not present in the SOWPODS list used for Scrabble tournaments, "impune" probably should have been allowed, since quite a lot of other obsolete words are permitted. Sorry, friend!
On the same day, a player pointed out that "login" wasn't permitted in a random puzzle. This word has found its way into some dictionaries, and even if it hadn't, it obviously has become a word. So from the obsolete to the new, there could be some extra words we should allow.
Here is the complete list of all the ones I know of:
These words will be available in daily puzzles after today, and in random puzzles immediately. Write in if there are other words you think should be added, preferably giving some reason to include your word - e.g. it's in a dictionary, it's in a book, it's in a newspaper article, etc. And do check out our rules to see if the word is eligible.
Incidentally, if you click on a word in the "Your Words" panel to see its meaning, you'll go to a different dictionary website from the one we've been using up till now. Let me know if you have any comments about the change.
2 December 2005
You now have a choice of two Chihuahua word puzzles every day:
Use the tabs at the top of the game to switch between the two puzzles:
And of course, there's no reason you can't play both.
If you play the Challenge puzzle, you can check the solution the day after the puzzle first appears, or any time in the following week. When you come back to the site, you can go to a previous daily puzzle using the selector:
Then the solution button will appear, and you can bring up all the words that could have been played for that puzzle.
Recently, the rules were changed to hide the solution to every puzzle until the next day. This was done in response to requests from some players. But the move was unpopular with some other players, and the number of people playing each day seems to have declined somewhat since the change. So to settle the matter once and for all, we now follow both approaches at once, by having two puzzles every day.
Hope you like the new set-up. Please let me know if you have any comments, or suggestions for further changes.
November 2005
A while ago, comments were invited on the claim that some players were cheating by looking up the solution on another computer and then just entering all the words under their normal player name. It was suggested that the solution should be withheld until the following day.
The general consensus of the comments sent in was that this change should be made, although a few players pointed out that people determined to cheat would always find a way, but that this shouldn't stop the rest of us getting enjoyment out of doing the best we can. As one player wrote, "I feel cheaters will get bored with it in the end 'cause what fun is there in that?!"
So, from now on, the solution will not be available until the following day, regardless of whether you have found the big word. When you come back another day, you can go back to the puzzle for any day in the past week using the selector under the "X" with the letters on it. (If you're using the same computer and cookies are allowed, you should see the words that you found for that puzzle.) Then the solution button will bring up all the other words that could have been played.
There is also a new measure of success, the "hit rate". This appears in the title bar of your word list, just after the word count, and shows the percentage of words tried that were accepted. This percentage is not affected by words that failed because they were too short, or missing the mandatory letter, or had already been found.
It has become apparent that some players, having noticed that a lot of unfamiliar words are accepted in Chihuahua, make a practice of trying out every conceivable combination of letters. If people find this style of play entertaining, good luck to them, but their scores are not comparable with those of players who concentrate more on trying to think of words they know.
My plan is eventually to put the hit rate on the scoreboard, so that people can measure their score against others who play in the same style. For the time being, your hit rate is visible only to you. And it relates only to the current session, if you have multiple sessions of playing the puzzle during the day.
If you have any opinions about these changes, don't hesitate to let me know!
Wednesday 12 October 2005
The Chihuahua puzzle now has two higher levels to aspire to. (The new levels will apply to daily puzzles starting on Thursday.) And we've beefed up the word display so you can see more words in the solution. You can also click on a word to look it up at a dictionary website.
The new target levels are called Maven and Cham. If you have a good chance of reaching either of these levels, you probably won't need to ask what they mean. But if you do want to know what the words mean and why we use them, look on the Q & A page here and here.
When you reach the Best threshold, the progress bar will change to show your new target level, Maven. Incidentally, the progress bar has been moved down so there's more room for long word lists and less need for scrolling. If you make it to Maven, Cham will appear. You need to get about 90% of the possible words to reach Cham. Since the word list used in Chihuahua (YAWL) is incredibly comprehensive, this is something that might hardly ever happen. But we'll see.
And what, you may ask, happens if a player finds absolutely all the possible words? Is there a special title for such a player? Well the word "cheat" comes to mind. But if a player legitimately finds all the possible words in a daily puzzle, he or she will gain the people's ovation and fame forever. And we'll try to dream up an appropriate title. ("Iron Chihuahua"?)
When you're looking at the solution, you have the option of seeing the full list of possible words, including the most obscure and archaic. Just click on the "Show all?" box above the words.
If you click on any of the words listed, the word will be looked up for you at the OneLook dictionary site. (A separate browser window will open.) Unfortunately, this site will not be able to locate a definition for every word accepted by Chihuahua, even though OneLook is about the most comprehensive dictionary site we know of.
Please let us know what you think of the changes to Chihuahua.