Semantle is hard mode Wordle, powered by a Google neural network

rockpapershotgun.com:

In many ways, Semantle is hard mode Wordle. Gone is the simplified dictionary and five-letter limit, meaning words can be any type and length, and gone is any indication of correctly guessed letters or positions.

Instead, you've got two new helpers: the ability to make infinite guesses, and a neural network able to learn word associations telling you how close, conceptually, you are to the correct answer. I've yet to find the solution in fewer than 50 guesses.

Semantle, built by David Turner, uses Word2vec, an algorithm created by researchers at Google which can crawl through a large amount of text and, on its own, work out how words relate to one another. It then represents those associations by creating, basically, a galaxy of words. Words that are close together are similar, words that are far apart are less so.

How this is represented in Semantle is as a number between 1 and 100 which tells you how similar your word is to the solution. In yesterday's game - like its inspiration, Semantle offers just one puzzle per day - the word "digest" had a similarity rating of 2.85 and "explode" had a rating of 16.17. The correct answer has a similarity rating of 100.

What makes this challenging is that the similarity number is boiling down potentially hundreds of different axes by which a word might be considered "similar". Perhaps you've used a synonym of the solution and are on the right track. Or, perhaps you've used an adjective and the solution is also an adjective, or a word that would appear in the same part of a sentence. If the solution has multiple substantially different definitions, the list of just-somewhat-similar words could be vast.

Where each guess in Wordle narrows options for your next attempted word,