Chainle terminology · glossary
Specificity adjustment
Definition: A penalty in bridge rounds: vague words such as 'something' or 'good' get their per-clue strengths multiplied by 0.6 before scoring.
Examples
- 'good' for any two clues scores far less than a concrete bridge word would.
The specificity adjustment is Chainle’s guard against hollow answers. In the bridge rounds (rounds 1-4), certain vague words — generic placeholders like “something”, or all-purpose praise like “good” — are only weakly meaningful relative to any clue. Instead of rejecting them outright, the scoring model multiplies their per-clue strengths by 0.6 before combining them, so a technically related but empty word earns far less than its raw similarity suggests.
The rule targets words that could be “related” to almost anything. A concrete noun such as “wax” for candle + honeycomb carries real information; “thing” carries almost none, and the ×0.6 factor turns that difference into points you can see.
Note the boundary: the adjustment applies in bridge rounds only. The close-meaning round (round 5) never uses it, because that round asks you to preserve a given sense rather than to bridge distinct clues.
Why it matters
If a submission you were sure about scores mysteriously low, vagueness is a likely culprit. Swapping a generic word for the most specific candidate you can find is one of the cheapest score recoveries in the game — the surrounding facts are unchanged, but the adjustment stops dragging the number down.