what about making the winner's words available? :-)

It may allow inner comments like “omfg, how did I forget to say 'winter'!!! "

;-) what do you think?

Or maybe just open a topic in which voluntarily the winners can post their words and points of each word,,, Richard, wanna start it? ;-)

You already get a lot of info on “past games” - have you seen it? I don't think more is necessary.

I saw, but tell me, don't you want to know how did Richard get that lot of points? :-)

I am wondering what these words were… but well, it was just a suggestion :o)

Since he got 154 out of a maximal 163, I know he got most of the top words…that's enough for me. ;-)

It would be nice to be able to check the word lists of other players. I'd like to compare some native speakers' lists with some lists of us people with a more or less limited vocabulary. After the first two rounds I suspect that linguistic limitations aren't a real handicap here.

Another thing troubles me - singular and plural are considered different words.

In the last game 'root' scored 28 and 'roots' 9. Is that a difference from the empathy point of view?

Worse yet, 'leaf'=42, 'leaves'=18 and 'leafs'=4. I wrote 'leave', incorrect, and got nothing for it. Which is OK in this case. But when a word has more than one form shouldn't them be considered together?

Of course I realise this is a difficult task for programming. The game is enough fun as it is now.

ok, tasmanian, i have just seen that in “past results” there is alink on the date, and then you see the list of all used words…

that's all I need! i think I overlooked that link.

I absolutely agree. At least singular and plural of the same word should be counted as the same “expression”. If that's at all technically possible.

Well, what about “always use singular forms”? Seems to be the intuitive approach of most players, and after all, this game is about guessing what the others will do, isn't it? ;)

Does anyone use google as an empathy reflector?

When you know the solution, you can check how much these expressions are used together on the web :

Tree + first 10 : 103 000 hits

Tree+green : 36.8 M

Tree+wood : 20.9 M

Tree+forest : 24.9 M

Tree+leaf : 11.5 M

Tree+branch : 17.8 M

Tree+root : 21.1 M

Tree+trunk : 6.0 M

Tree+bark : 5.7 M

Tree+leaves : 20.9 M

Tree+oak : 11.1 M

… maybe that is not so good after all, my

Happy+tree : 28.2 M got only 1 point,

and should I have avoided the “obvious”

Tree+oxygen : 3.8 M ?

I tried google (www.googlefight.com is good), but I do not think about green :(

To be fair I made a point to not use this, but Google Sets could be used.. http://labs.google.com/sets

Enter some terms and it will give you additional ones..

tree, green, leaf, branch, trunk would give http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=tree&q2=green&q3=leaf&q4=branch&q5=trunk&btn=Large+Set

You still have to be able to come up with a few terms to get a better set, but this could give additional ideas. Like I said, I don't use it b/c it could be too helpful. But it's interesting to use after the contest to see what words come out.

BTW, as far as singluar vs. plural, I don't think it's realistic to code that. But Figilano mentioned “always use singular forms”. If people adhered to this, it would benefit the player to mainly use singular words, and the problem would theoretically go away (the more people that use singular words, the less points the variations would be worth).

TREE and BRANCH gives results such as: men, beach, psychedelia

heheheh :)

Yeah, the more inputs the better. :)