This post explores how a Codenames player could dominate the game by memorizing the 40 setup cards that come with the game, rather than relying on word associations. The author built a simple bot that uses only positional information from these cards and found it beats most human players, demonstrating that the game has an exploitable side-channel vulnerability. Despite this flaw, the author argues Codenames still has better replayability than most word games, which typically break down after just a few plays when players memorize common word associations.
Aug 1, 2024 Measurement & DataSoftware Engineering