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Show HN: I built a Wordle decoder that guesses your guesses

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Re: Show HN: I built a Wordle decoder that guesses your guesses

#11

Post by mattlock »

eat_veggies wrote: post #10

the most interesting part of this imo is the heuristic it uses to find the most likely word: # Greatly penalize words that have multiple of the same black letters # Greatly penalize words that have the same black letters as any seen word # Greatly penalize words that have the same yellow letter/index pair as any seen word # Reward words that have yellow letters that match yellow letters in seen words, but in differen…

I honestly thought I removed those comments lol. They might be a little outdated, but yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about what kinds of information I could glean. There's definitely some bias in there towards a certain kind of strategy/play.

I like your project, very creative!

Re: Show HN: I built a Wordle decoder that guesses your guesses

#14

Post by ghaff »

mattlock wrote: post #11
eat_veggies wrote: post #10

the most interesting part of this imo is the heuristic it uses to find the most likely word: # Greatly penalize words that have multiple of the same black letters # Greatly penalize words that have the same black letters as any seen word # Greatly penalize words that have the same yellow letter/index pair as any seen word # Reward words that have yellow letters that match yellow letters in seen words, but in differen…

I honestly thought I removed those comments lol. They might be a little outdated, but yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about what kinds of information I could glean. There's definitely some bias in there towards a certain kind of strategy/play. I like your project, very creative!

Looking at the parent run, my first thought was that its initial guess is a relatively uncommon word and is (I assume) probably not a very good choice as an initial guess. There are various lists of the best starting words in order going around. I wonder if you could get to the best results by picking the highest ranked word consistent with the other lines?

Re: Show HN: I built a Wordle decoder that guesses your guesses

#15

Post by Symbiote »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #3

I briefly had the thought of creating a game where you get a bunch of those Wordle color square messages from in-game "friends", and maybe some side info - "Tim always guesses adieu as his first word", "Jane always uses one of her kids' names - Olive or Hazel", etc and then you have to guess the word. Haven't had time to experiment with it though so not sure how fun it'd be. I don't retain any rights to the idea if a…

I tried that in a single game with a friend's Octordle result. You have to solve it yourself first, then work out their initial guesses. Here's my solution to today's Octordle:

  O = incorrect (white)
  ~ = wrong place (yellow)
  # = correct (green)

  Daily Octordle #40 / octordle.com

  OOOOO ~~~OO
  OO~OO OOOOO
  ~O~O~ OOOOO
  OOOOO O~#OO
  OO~OO OOOOO
  #OOOO O##OO
  OOOOO #####
  #OOOO ·····
  OOOOO ·····
  OOOOO ·····
  OOOOO ·····
  ##### ·····

  ~~O~O O~~OO
  OOOO~ OOO~O
  OOOOO OOOO~
  ###O# OO#OO
  #OOOO OOOOO
  OO#OO #####
  OO#O~ ·····
  O~OOO ·····
  O~~~# ·····
  O~O~O ·····
  O~O~O ·····
  OOOOO ·····
  ##### ·····

  O#OOO OOOOO
  OOO~O ~OOO~
  OOOO~ O~#OO
  OO~OO #OOOO
  OOOOO #####
  #O~O# ·····
  ~O~OO ·····
  ##### ·····

  O#~#O ~#O~O
  OOOOO OOOO~
  OOOOO OOOOO
  OO~O~ ~O~##
  OOOOO ~OOOO
  O~~OO OO~~O
  #~~OO OO~O~
  O#~OO O#OOO
  O#OO~ #####
  ##O## ·····
  ##### ·····
(This one was difficult and/or arbitrary, I normally try and complete Octordle in 11 guesses, i.e. the 8 correct answers plus three extra.)

My first three guesses, base64 encoded: VEFSRUQKTE9JTlMKQ0hVTVAK

Re: Show HN: I built a Wordle decoder that guesses your guesses

#17

Post by mattlock »

ghaff wrote: post #14
mattlock wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly thought I removed those comments lol. They might be a little outdated, but yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about what kinds of information I could glean. There's definitely some bias in there towards a certain kind of strategy/play. I like your project, very creative!

Looking at the parent run, my first thought was that its initial guess is a relatively uncommon word and is (I assume) probably not a very good choice as an initial guess. There are various lists of the best starting words in order going around. I wonder if you could get to the best results by picking the highest ranked word consistent with the other lines?

I thought about using lists like that, but it felt a little too much like cheating. My attempt at something like this is, if the word is one of your first two guesses, I reward it for having more common letters. And actually penalize common letter "misses" in later lines. I'm sure it's not 100% optimal, but I saw some improvement on my admittedly very limited set of test data. Here's the relevant code - https://github.com/mattruzicka/wordle_decoder/blob/0bfd7eaac...

Re: Show HN: I built a Wordle decoder that guesses your guesses

#18

Post by mattlock »

yaps8 wrote: post #16

I love it, thanks for sharing. Is the confidence a percentage? How is it determined?

Yeah, you can think of it as a percentage. The min is 1 and the max is 99. It could be 100, but I don't trust my mostly untested side project that much, so I cut it off at 99 :)

The base confidence score is determined based on how many words a guess technically could be, that's here - https://github.com/mattruzicka/wordle_decoder/blob/0bfd7eaac...

Then, I sort of just willy nilly add/subtract from that based on the "intrinsic" score of the word which is computed here - https://github.com/mattruzicka/wordle_decoder/blob/0bfd7eaac... and then the "contextualized" score AKA how well it works with other words, which is computed here - https://github.com/mattruzicka/wordle_decoder/blob/0bfd7eaac...

Re: Show HN: I built a Wordle decoder that guesses your guesses

#19

Post by lkbm »

lastofthemojito wrote: post #3

I briefly had the thought of creating a game where you get a bunch of those Wordle color square messages from in-game "friends", and maybe some side info - "Tim always guesses adieu as his first word", "Jane always uses one of her kids' names - Olive or Hazel", etc and then you have to guess the word. Haven't had time to experiment with it though so not sure how fun it'd be. I don't retain any rights to the idea if a…

That could be a lot of fun. Someone did a "guess the word based on people's tweets a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30101456

Throwing in those extra hints about the players make it feel more like a zebra puzzle, but that's not a bad thing, especially if you want mere humans to solve it. I can't easily process a thousand tweets, so giving more compact data is key.

Re: Show HN: I built a Wordle decoder that guesses your guesses

#20

Post by ghaff »

mattlock wrote: post #17
ghaff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the parent run, my first thought was that its initial guess is a relatively uncommon word and is (I assume) probably not a very good choice as an initial guess. There are various lists of the best starting words in order going around. I wonder if you could get to the best results by picking the highest ranked word consistent with the other lines?

I thought about using lists like that, but it felt a little too much like cheating. My attempt at something like this is, if the word is one of your first two guesses, I reward it for having more common letters. And actually penalize common letter "misses" in later lines. I'm sure it's not 100% optimal, but I saw some improvement on my admittedly very limited set of test data. Here's the relevant code - https://githu…

Of course, doing what I wrote also makes the assumption that the person playing is using one of the top 10 (or whatever) starting words which may or may not be correct.

That aside, I started playing a 6 letter variant and, while I haven't done any sort of analysis with access to the word list, I did do a quick Word Hippo analysis of words with common letters, especially vowels, and while I'm sure my results aren't optimal they're probably pretty good.

ADDED: Which I think is probably not all that different from what your code is doing. I fed Word Hippo 4 or 5 letters and told it to come up with some common words.

But that still requires an assumption that a player has given some thought to good starting guesses.

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