February 18, 2026
Bots 3, Humans 52
A solver for Semantle
Semantle ‘cheat code’ lands: 3 guesses, cue chaos
TLDR: A simple solver now beats Semantle in roughly three guesses by filtering words using the game’s hot/cold scores. The crowd is torn: some applaud the hack, others worry it kills the challenge, and many recommend Pimantle’s visual map—sparking memes, copycat projects, and lively debate.
Semantle, the Wordle cousin that scores word meaning instead of letter matches, just met its match. Two Recurse Center builders dropped a simple solver that nails the secret word in about three guesses. Meanwhile, mere mortals celebrate scraping to “medical” on guess 52. The trick? Use each hot/cold score to slice away impossible words until only the right one survives—no PhD required, just clever filtering.
The comments erupted. One camp clapped—tptacek called it “Peter Norvig sudoku energy,” that classic vibe where humans sweat while a tiny script steamrolls. Others sighed, like a_shovel, who bailed on the game for lack of strategy and hoped this would help actual players. A third crowd shouted “don’t kill the fun” and pointed to Pimantle, which adds a friendly 2D map of guesses so you can see clusters and chase the answer without black-box vibes. Builder energy surged as OisinMoran said the post pushed them to publish their own messy solver. The meme parade was immediate: “press F for Semantle,” jokes about unlocking a cheat code, and scoreboard banter of “3 > 300.” Whether this saves the game or ends it, the community brought popcorn and plenty of hot takes.
Key Points
- •Semantle scores guesses by cosine similarity in a 300-dimensional word2vec embedding space trained on Google News.
- •Human play is hard because each cosine similarity provides limited directional information in semantic space.
- •Directly solving for the target embedding via linear equations would require ~300 independent guesses, which is impractical.
- •The authors built a solver at the Recurse Center that reportedly finds the answer in about three guesses.
- •Their method uses a geometric filtering approach: each guess constrains the target to words matching the returned similarity, progressively eliminating candidates from the full vocabulary.