About

About Polyphonia

Polyphonia is a free daily word-association puzzle. Each day there is a start word and a goal word; you link from word to word, using six kinds of link (rhymes, synonyms, opposites, phrases, kinds or parts, and words that go together), until you reach the goal in as few links as you can.

The idea

Word association is usually a straight line. In Polyphonia the words you find are drawn as stars, and each kind of link is drawn in its own colour and line style, so every solve leaves a small constellation. Each link type also has its own notes: when you finish, “Hear your constellation” plays your route as a melody.

How the puzzles are made

Three puzzles (Easy, Medium and Hard) are generated for every date, ahead of time. Start and goal words come from about 600 common, concrete words, and no word repeats within 60 days. Candidate routes come from an offline index of about 18,600 common words built from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary and WordNet. Every link on a route is checked by the same link judge that checks players’ moves, and par is the length of the shortest route it verified.

How links are judged

Rhymes and sound-alikes are decided by the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Meanings, opposites, phrases, kinds and associations are decided by an AI decision model that estimates whether most players would accept the link. Verdicts are saved, so the same two words always get the same answer. Players can flag a rejected link with “Should count?”, and flagged links are used to improve the judge.

Playing

• Free, in any modern web browser, on phones, tablets and computers.
• No account or sign-up; progress and streaks are saved in your browser.
• A new puzzle at each difficulty every day at midnight, local time.
• Written in international English: both “colour” and “color” are fine.

Credits

Pronunciations: CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Word relations: WordNet (Princeton University). Sound: Tone.js. Type: JetBrains Mono.