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Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

dontwordle.com

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Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#101

Post by gweinberg »

julianwachholz wrote: post #84
ghaff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What makes a Wordle square yellow One thing I had wondered--but not enough to figure out what the code does... Let's say you enter Mamma for example. And there is one M in the word but in the second position. Which M square does Wordle choose to turn yellow? (But maybe it doesn't matter?) There may be other cases like that as well.

For yellow squares, the particular order in which they turn yellow doesn't matter. The remaining grey Ms tell you the same thing (that those positions don't have an M).

That's true for Wordle, but I think according to the dontwordle rules you are allowed to make a guess with an em on one of the grey squares anyway.

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#103

Post by giyanani »

Jane street had a puzzle related to this, called eldrow [1], a few months ago.

The gist is you’re trying to find the worst sequence of (hard mode) guesses possible for any word in the wordle set.

Their site shows submissions of up to 16 words and claims 17 is impossible [2]. I’ve been trying to do the same, but have yet to cut the search space enough[3].

Ex: calculating the worst chain for jazzy (with a 1000 word subset of the full word list) took an m1 core 1 hour and resulted in the ten-word chain:

civic, buggy, woody, array, leaky, mammy, fanny, happy, tasty, jazzy

[1] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-index/ [2] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/eldrow-solution/ [3] https://github.com/roshangiyanani/wordle/blob/main/wordle/el...

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#104

Post by dandanua »

lapetitejort wrote: post #31

Seems like the best strategy is to choose words with repeat letters. For example, two great first choices would be LOLLY and SASSY. That's two empty cells that can't be used to guess.

Another strategy is to use rarer letters, like in FUZZY.

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#105

Post by KerrickStaley »

I was able to win by starting with the 3 guesses JUJUS, IMMIX, PZAZZ and going from there. These words were taking from the worst starting words list at https://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best..., which is a great writeup on optimal Wordle strategy.

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#106

Post by jeffbee »

djsamseng wrote: post #91
DungZeekFu wrote: post #63

I seem to have found a bug (or the word list is drastically different from Wordle). The game says I have 3 possible words remaining, but every Wordle solver website says I only have 2 (and I only have 2 guesses remaining, so this is the difference between the game being winnable and not). The guesses I used for today were WRITE,BOODY,VOUCH,COMMA (and at this point the only two possible words are FOCAL and LOCAL, but…

SOCAS?

Safety of Cats at Sea?

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#107

Post by db_admin »

gweinberg wrote: post #101
julianwachholz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For yellow squares, the particular order in which they turn yellow doesn't matter. The remaining grey Ms tell you the same thing (that those positions don't have an M).

That's true for Wordle, but I think according to the dontwordle rules you are allowed to make a guess with an em on one of the grey squares anyway.

No you are not allowed to do that. A grey square excludes the letter from the position, regardless of any yellow squares.

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#108

Post by phnofive »

DungZeekFu wrote: post #63

I seem to have found a bug (or the word list is drastically different from Wordle). The game says I have 3 possible words remaining, but every Wordle solver website says I only have 2 (and I only have 2 guesses remaining, so this is the difference between the game being winnable and not). The guesses I used for today were WRITE,BOODY,VOUCH,COMMA (and at this point the only two possible words are FOCAL and LOCAL, but…

There are three words that match - FOCAL, VOCAL, LOCAL - but of course you can't use 'V' in position one again, so that's a bug.

There are two dictionaries, and the second contains 2309 entries which are found in the 12974 entries of the first.

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#109

Post by re »

DungZeekFu wrote: post #63

I seem to have found a bug (or the word list is drastically different from Wordle). The game says I have 3 possible words remaining, but every Wordle solver website says I only have 2 (and I only have 2 guesses remaining, so this is the difference between the game being winnable and not). The guesses I used for today were WRITE,BOODY,VOUCH,COMMA (and at this point the only two possible words are FOCAL and LOCAL, but…

> every Wordle solver website says I only have 2

There are two different Wordle word lists--the set of legal guesses (roughly 13k) and the set of words in the solution list (roughly 2k). The latter list is curated to be a set of fair, interesting words, excluding plurals and more obscure words. Most Wordle solvers use knowledge of what words are in the Wordle solution database to pare down the set of "possible words". But with Don't Wordle, the "legal guess" list ends up being the more interesting one to show "remaining possibilities" for.

https://scoredle.com/ is a site that shows possible remaining words using the larger "legal guess" list, so you can see that you could have also guessed "SOCAS".

> Another point of confusion is that the first row says 2318 possible words, but there only seem to be 2309 words in the dictionary in the code

There were 2318 remaining possible words AFTER your first guess, which eliminated ~11k possibilities.

Re: Show HN: Can you lose at Wordle if you tried?

#110

Post by yreg »

ajjenkins wrote: post #60

It would be nice if there was a Give Up button. I got down to 30 possible words but could not for the life of me think of what they could be. I was craving that “Ohhhhh!!!!!” feeling when you see what the remaining possible words are.

If you want to give up you can "cheat" by using a tool like https://word.tips/
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