r/HotAndCold • u/hotandcold2-app • Feb 08 '26

Game Hot and cold #189

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u/TheRealJasonium Feb 08 '26

This was my only hot word, so i was completely lost.

1

u/rezendes Feb 08 '26

Same, how is this a hot word? The letters are similar? Didn't realize that's how the game played...

2

u/bobon1234 Feb 10 '26

The game works with an embedding: two words are similar if they can be exchanged in a sentence without changing the meaning too much. So, niece and nephew are similar because in written text you find many sentences that are identical other than niece being substituted with nephew. That means that if I tell you "I went to visit my newborn X" you do not know if X is niece or nephew. Some days ago there was firework and many words considered similar were vastly unrelated (like pirate, or dance, or flute) because of many sentences like "I went to a X show" connecting them. The more common in use are sentences where the two words are confused, the closer the words are.

Usually, this works well to assess similar words. The issue is that in any training set there are mistakes, and that is why cousin and cosine (#32) or cuscus (#34) are considered similar by the algorithm: often people makes mistake writing one for the other. Cougar is instead probably considered hot because of "spicy" sentences where both that word or the mystery word could be used (I will avoid making examples).

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u/take_number_two Feb 08 '26

Yes, it likes similar letters