SPEAKER 1: OK, our sixth puzzle of this year
was called Catewordle, based on the famous Wordle game.
So for this one, we had maybe about a thousand or so correct
answers and 513 good guesses, but not correct ones.
So let's have our friends at Meta walk us through the solution to Catewordle.
JAMES WU: Awesome.
So this is James here again at Catewordle.
I worked this puzzle.
I'm glad a lot of you seem to like it.
So let's just go over the solution now.
So the first step of this puzzle--
as with the previous puzzle that I wrote--
starts with a bunch of crossword clues.
You'll see a lot of different Wordle things,
but there's at least one thing that you can first grab,
which is a hopefully straightforward crossword clue in each of these.
The first one was weight of a liter of water.
The next one was the Roman god of the sea.
And you can see the solutions to these on the right here.
So we have kilogram, Neptune, green, North America, fire, gluttony, taste,
and happy.
And this puzzle-- when we wrote it-- was based around Wordle, as you can see,
which was an extremely popular word game that came out right when
we were writing this puzzle.
And you'll see that each of these Wordles
consists of a single crossword clue with the correct answer
that we've now solved and a bunch of Wordle answers that have Wordle clues,
like green, gray, and yellow attached to them, similar to the Wordle game.
And there are different lengths.
But there's nothing that really gives you
any hint as to what those other guesses of this Wordle puzzle could have been.
Luckily, the title of the puzzle was Catewordle,
and maybe you would notice that-- for example-- for the North America answer
with "Canada and Mexico are part of it" that one of the Wordle clues
was very, very close to North America.
In fact, it ended with "th" "America."
And there's not very many things that end with "th America" that
aren't South America.
So when I noticed that South America fits in the Wordle clue
and is green exactly where it should be, and is the last one of this one.
And if you do this for all of the ones in this section,
you'll notice that they all seem to fit a certain category.
So you might be able to deduce that once you
have South America, that maybe another one could
be one of the other continents, like Asia and Africa.
And it turns out that each of these Wordle answers in North America
and in each of these matches with the same category
as the original crossword clue.
So I give two examples here for Africa, Antarctica, Asia,
Oceania, and South America.
A lot of you actually asked questions about Oceania and Australia
being potentially one of the words.
We choose actually Oceania for this puzzle.
There is some debate, depending on where on Earth you are, which one of those
is the actual continent.
But either way, you end up with all of these words from these categories.
For fire, you might notice air and Earth as the four elements.
And if you do this for all of them, you'll see that each one of them
actually has a list of categories.
So kilogram was the SI base units.
Neptune was the planets of the solar system.
We did not include Pluto because it's been long enough that we've considered
it not part of the solar system.
I'm sorry, Pluto.
Green being the colors of the rainbow.
North America being the continent, fire being the four elements,
gluttony being the seven deadly sins, taste being the five senses--
so hearing, sight, smell--
and happy being the list of Snow White's seven dwarves.
Now, each of these Wordle puzzles also came
with another clue, which is that it said, Wordle six out of seven,
Wordle four out of five, three out of four.
So usually, the number next to the Wordle--
if you've ever tweeted out or shared a Wordle-- is the number of guesses
it took to answer the Wordle puzzle.
So you'll often see when people tweet it out, "Wordle five out of six,"
for example.
But here, the hint here was that each one of them
was off by one in that there's exactly one of each of these categories
that was missing from each of the Wordle puzzles.
So if you were to pick out the word that was missing
from each of the categories-- so a second
was the SI unit that was missing from the Wordle answer with kilogram.
Jupiter was missing from the planets.
Blue was missing from the rainbow.
Europe was missing from the continents.
You get another list of words.
Now, the final step here is now that you have a second list of missing words
and the original Wordle answer is to see what
would have happened if you had guessed the missing word on this word.
If you do that and you overlap each of the missing
words with the original Wordle answer, you'll
see that they share exactly one letter in the green space.
So kilogram shares the letter "o" with second.
Neptune shows the letter "P" with Jupiter.
And so on.
And if you were to do this with all of the words,
you end up being able to extract one letter from each of the puzzle answers
and end up with the answer "operetta," which is the answer to Catewordle.