I scored 71,000.

I use the language to understand not get an effect

It's annoying that you need to click 3 times per question, and the buttons are in 2 different places.

Maybe would be better to just let me click the answer I want and then instantly show me the next question?

Also who is Sandi?

I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so. Having to click on submit twice really breaks the flow.

Also in all the words I tried I noticed out of the 4 options one is the correct one, another is the opposite of the correct one, and the other 2 are random stuff. You can basically skip any option whose antonym isn't present as well.

I'm curious how the difficult is chosen because "obfuscate" was included in the hardest difficulty but I would not consider that to me a difficult word.

Also I found that some of the definitions were not completely correct.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2806377

Fun!

I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust score at the beginning, then things settle down.

In practice this means you get a sequence of increasingly uncommon words initially, until you get one wrong, then you drop back to something easier until you start getting things right again, and eventually circle around words at your level.

Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick (or add an undo button).

English is not my native language. I get my vocabulary from browsing the Internet. There is no way I know that many words.

One suggestion would be more convincing decoy choices, some were pretty silly. But I have no idea how they come up with them.

3 clicks per is what gives it away. and the little compliments. and that it's 100 questions

Vibe coders need to be forced to spend one day learning basic CSS before they're allowed to use an LLM to make a website and the internet would be a lot more pleasant as we move forward with slopification.. It doesn't have to be sloppy, and doesn't take all that much studying to at least be able to steer an llm in the right direction to make something look nice. At this point everything is just the same 3 colors and a centered flex column with weird spacing.

Got 64,650: 20/19/17/18/12 (the intermediate one was a dumb mistake)

But to be honest many that might catch out a native speaker are just the Spanish/French/Latin word, so it was too easy in a way.

And it didn't even tell me at the end how many words I know!

There is a similar variant of such a test where you just go down a list of words of increasing obscurity, ticking the ones you are familiar with. If you do this once or twice, you can get a fairly good estimate of the actual number of words you know.

But then below it said "you are a man of few words".

I take it the latter is just because I've only done the test once? But it's mixed messaging on first attempt I think.

Level 0: Core Basics Abundant, Baffle, Candid, Dwell, Emerge, Frugal, Generic, Hinder, Impartial, Jovial, Knack, Lucid, Meager, Naive, Obsolete, Peculiar, Quench, Refute, Seldom, Tedious, Unique, Valid, Wary, Yearn, Zeal, Adequate, Barren, Coarse, Diligent, Esteem, Fickle, Gloom, Hoax, Ignite, Jolt, Keen, Linger, Mend, Numb, Omit, Pledge, Quota, Rural, Soothe, Toxic, Urge, Vow, Witty, Yield.

Level 1: Intermediate Acumen, Benevolent, Complacent, Dilapidated, Eloquent, Fabricate, Gregarious, Hypothetical, Imminent, Juxtapose, Lethargic, Meticulous, Nostalgia, Oblivious, Pragmatic, Reiterate, Scrutinize, Tentative, Ubiquitous, Verbose, Wane, Aesthetic, Bolster, Candor, Defer, Elicit, Furtive, Glut, Heed, Impeccable, Lament, Modicum, Notorious, Opulent, Plausible, Resilient, Stagnant, Trivial, Viable, Zenith.

Level 2: Advanced Alleviate, Breviary, Cacophony, Deferential, Ephemeral, Fastidious, Garrulous, Harangue, Iconoclast, Juggernaut, Laconic, Magnanimous, Nefarious, Obsequious, Paradigm, Recalcitrant, Sanguine, Taciturn, Ubiquity, Vacillate, Winsome, Zephyr, Abase, Banal, Capricious, Debilitate, Ebullient, Facetious, Gaikwar, Hackneyed, Idiosyncrasy, Jargon, Kindle, Labyrinth, Maverick, Narcissism, Ostracize, Palliate, Quagmire, Rancorous, Sagacity, Tantamount.

Level 3: Expert Abstemious, Bellicose, Chicanery, Deleterious, Enervate, Fatuous, Gauche, Hegemony, Inculcate, Jejune, Kowtow, Lugubrious, Mawkish, Nonsectarian, Obdurate, Pernicious, Quotidian, Recapitulate, Supercilious, Tempestuous, Unctuous, Vehement, Winnow, Xenophobe, Ziggurat, Acquiesce, Bombastic, Circumlocution, Desultory, Equinox, Fiduciary, Gerrymandering, Hubris, Incognito, Kinetic, Loquacious, Metamorphosis, Nihilism, Orthography, Precipitous, Quasar, Reparation, Soliloquy.

Level 4: Grandmaster (The Obscure) Accoutrement, Brobdingnagian, Crepuscular, Defenestrate, Equanimity, Flibbertigibbet, Grandiloquent, Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, Ineffable, Jingoism, Kerfuffle, Logorrhea, Mellifluous, Obfuscate, Panacea, Quixotic, Rococo, Sesquipedalian, Tergiversate, Ultracrepidarian, Vicissitude, Weltschmerz, Xeric, Yclept, Zeitgeist, Absquatulate, Bumbershoot, Callipygian, Dord, Ergophobia, Fartlek, Gobbledygook, Houghmagandy, Interrobang, Kakistocracy, Lollygag, Mumpsimus, Nudiustertian, Omphaloskepsis, Pogonotrophy, Quire, Ratoon, Snollygoster, Tittynope, Ucalegon, Vagitus, Widdershins, Xylopolist, Yarborough, Zenzizenzizenzic.

Some definitions were not great and alternatives a little silly at times but on the whole seemed pretty accurate.

Also probably needs calibrated as 96/100 was projected to 77k words, what would the estimate be for 100/100?

I'm not sure exactly how you did this, but I think you asked an LLM to come up with the wrong options. Two things to consider:

1. While the LLM can go r good options, they won't be always hard to guess. I wonder if instead you can have the LLM generate very close words (or skip using an LLM entirely) and put those as the options. 2. If you will generate options with an LLM, make sure you are mindful of its inability to shuffle things around. The correct answer was overwhelmingly the first or second option in the list. You should ask the model to give the options in a uniform order (say from true meaning then decreasing amount of replayability), then manually shuffle them so that the probability of which option (A, B, C or D) is always 25%.

Then I was doing poorly in grandmaster, until I realize you can ace grandmaster by just picking the longest explanation every time.

Probably not too bad for a person whose native language is not English.

My shorter OED contains 163,000 words (compared to the 600,000 words of the longer).

According to this site I know 71,000 words... Let's test that against the OED. I should have about 43% chance if knowing a word picked at random.

In my totally scientific test (ha) I chose 50 words at random from the OED and discovered I knew 29 of them for a score of 58% which is more than two sigma from 43%, this disproving the hypothesis.

I forgot what that was now, but it was a fun experiment.

My score: 78,000 words, 20/20/19/18/18.

Are accoutrement and ziggurat really English words? Accoutrement is even pronounced as French!

From what I can tell they actually have a bit more robust science behind their algorithm (and a lot less questions to answer)

It would have paired well with an exposition of vanilla Monte Carlo and the benefits of stratified sampling.

Although stratified sampling is good, one can do better in this case by using adaptive sampling, where one uses a runtime (Bayesian) estimate of vocabulary to maximize information gain per question.

I wonder if the test is calibrated to the fact that some answers are just well-guessed? I am a non-native English speaker, but I speak 3 languages overall and have basic notions in Latin, and I have to admit it helped a lot in "deciphering" a few words that I didn't really knew. And in at least 2 cases I just guessed well.

I suppose the words must be weighed, because other people in the thread with more correct words got a not much higher estimate.