c4countdown

Hi everyone,

I'm a new member. I'm 22 years old and live in Bath. I've not yet applied to be on Countdown, though my friends say I should and I've come pretty close a few times before bottling it.

I signed up to let you all know about the Countdown Practise game I've been making: http://incoherency.co.uk/countdown/practise/

Please give it a go, I'd appreciate any feedback you have!

Cheers,
James

P.S. Mods: if you think this is spammy I'll be happy to delete the mention of my website

This looks great, certainly a lot more slick and useful than any other Countdown game generator I've seen online. While the lexicon isn't perfectly up-to-date with the one used on Countdown, it's very very close - did you make this word list yourself? Very good effort all in all, this is certainly what I'd use first if I wanted to play some rounds when apterous is down, or host games outside of apterous.

Hi James, this is great, played 20 rounds with it and couldn't find any fault with the dictionary there

This looks familiar

Awesome job, looks and plays loads better than it did like 6 months ago when I spoke to you then. Nice work.

I think the only way to improve it would be the addition of an algorithm that separates similar letters, particularly vowels - just had a round that had two consecutive Us and three consecutive Ts, and another where four of the five vowels were an A. This is very rare on Countdown itself because someone looks over the letter piles before games begin, helping to provide an order of letters which is what the general public thinks that random looks like (i.e. fewer, or better separated, repeat letters, than would actually occur in a random system).

Awesome. I got a 9 first round I played so it gets my approval

Callum Todd wrote:Awesome. I got a 9 first round I played so it gets my approval

I played one round and the max was a couple of obscure 5s. Maybe I was unlucky.

Great!!

Thanks for the kind words all!

Innis: the word list is "2of4brif" from 12dicts: http://wordlist.aspell.net/12dicts/ with a handful of my own changes.

Andy: thanks a lot! I wasn't aware letters should be separated like that, I'll do it tonight. It does obey the relative letter weightings from the show.

Yeah, I think Graeme Cole did a piece of analysis on it.

If I remember rightly, the results showed that the 'manual separation' is not really so prominent with the consonants (see round 8 here for instance) as it is with the vowels though.

Welcome to the forum, James. Apply for Countdown whenever you're ready - they're always accepting applications and there's nothing to be worried about. The production team take good care of you and you'll have a great time.

Andy Platt wrote:Yeah, I think Graeme Cole did a piece of analysis on it.

If I remember rightly, the results showed that the 'manual separation' is not really so prominent with the consonants (see round 8 here for instance) as it is with the vowels though.

What I found was that having repeated vowels together in the vowel pile happens much less frequently than you would expect by chance, but it doesn't prove there's any deliberate attempt to make it like that. It could just be a side-effect of face-up shuffling. If while shuffling the vowel pile you see three or four As together, you're instinctively going to think "whoops, I haven't shuffled that bit" and redistribute them.