When playing the English Wordle, people can search for five-letter words based on clues they already have. Instead, I’m going to make a Handle helper, which I call a second brain, that will help people reach the hidden four-character idiom. I’m not going to create a fully automated Handle solver. In the third line, the final "uo" colored in orange means that there is at least one character in the idiom that has the final "ou" in their pinyin but the character is not in position 2.
We can also create a knowledge graph of chengyu (four-character Chinese idiom) and Chinese characters that are connected using edges to represent their relations.īefore we dive into how to solve Handle using a knowledge graph, I’d like to go through how to play Handle without the help of computers. Imagining a knowledge graph of five-letter words and letters that are connected using edges representing their relations (contain or made up of), each try in the game will give you some clues (hopefully!) about how to approach the hidden answer in the network of words and letters. The idea behind the solution is that I believe a knowledge graph is the best way to mimic how we search for the final answer in our minds in games like Wordle and Handle. Today, I’d like to write about how I solved Handle (the Chinese Wordle) using a different approach – knowledge graph. Of all magics that were used to solve Wordle, I was most impressed by Grant Sanderson (or 3Blue1Brown as he is known on YouTube), who provided an elegant and delightful way to solve Wordle using information theory. Here is an example of how Handle is successfully played. Of course, each game is given a hint to indicate one of the character’s pinyin or hanzi (depending on how hard you want the game to be).
While English Wordle uses letters and their positions to indicate whether players have made the correct guess, Handle uses pinyin, a romanization system for Simplified Chinese in mainland China, to give players feedback.Īfter every guess in Handle, each hanzi and their pinyin is marked as either cyan, orange, or gray: cyan indicates the hanzi or the pinyin partial (the initial or the final) is correct and in the correct position, orange means that it is in the answer but not in the right position, while gray indicates it is not in the answer at all. Like Wordle, Handle allows players to try 10 times to guess a four-character Chinese idiom, or chengyu. (And you guessed it right, it is a combination of hanzi and Wordle.) In China, where most people are more familiar with Chinese characters, or hanzi, Wordle fans have invented a localized version of Wordle with a very clever name: Handle. However, for non-alphabetic languages like Chinese, a simple adaptation of the English Wordle’s rules just won’t work. We have seen many Wordle variants for languages that use the Latin script, such as the Spanish Wordle, French Wordle, and German Wordle. The game made by Josh Wardle allows players to try six times to guess a five-letter word, with feedback given for each guess in the form of colored tiles indicating when letters match or occupy the correct position. Wordle is going viral these days on social media.