I Simulated 38,612 Countryle Games to Find the Best Strategy

2 days ago

The author enjoys geography games like GeoGuessr, Globle, Travle, and Countryle.
Countryle provides feedback on direction, continent, hemisphere, population, and temperature to help guess the target country.
The author built a solver for Countryle using five modules, each handling a different feedback type.
Shannon entropy was used to determine the most informative guesses by measuring how evenly a guess splits possible outcomes.
Greece was found to be the most informative guess for directional feedback due to its balanced distribution.
The solver initially used great-circle routes for direction but switched to rhumb lines (loxodromes) for more intuitive results.
The Mercator projection, used in Countryle, preserves angles but distorts area, especially near the poles.
Libya was identified as the best starting guess when balancing all feedback types, but other countries like the Republic of the Congo performed better in average solve depth.
The solver achieves an average of 2.85 guesses to find the target country when all modules are enabled.
Future improvements could include optimizing module weights and refining population and temperature bucket handling.

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