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Adversarial Wordle

qntm.org

11–20 of 72 posts

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#11
Still love seeing Sam's stuff show up in my world! (Check iut Hatetris for another variant of the theme)

An excellent chance to use my Wordle solver based on optimizing information gain (ie guessing to minimize the number of words remaining in a worst case scenario)

Since this is essentially Wordle golf, my score was 5.

RAVED SPLIT BUNCO BOOBY BOOZY

His dictionary is missing some of the SGB wordlist ...

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#12
I like it. My suboptimal play:

C R A N K (0 green, 0 yellow)

M Y T H S (0 green, 0 yellow)

P L U M B (0 green, 1 yellow)

L Y R E S (0 green, 2 yellow)

O I L E D (2 green, 2 yellow)

F I E L D (4 green, 0 yellow)

W I E L D (5 green, 0 yellow)

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#13

I was literally playing with the idea of 'Adversarial Worlde', as I also called it, yesterday! Except it was multiplayer with one player being randomly assigned either the role of the guesser or the role of the defender. Then I learnt that the inventor of Wordle is named Josh Wardle, which could be a portmanteau of war and wordle.

Mastermind? :-)

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#14

I was literally playing with the idea of 'Adversarial Worlde', as I also called it, yesterday! Except it was multiplayer with one player being randomly assigned either the role of the guesser or the role of the defender. Then I learnt that the inventor of Wordle is named Josh Wardle, which could be a portmanteau of war and wordle.

Mastermind? :-)

What makes the strategy a bit different from Mastermind is that you have so many more letters than colours.

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#15

Still love seeing Sam's stuff show up in my world! (Check iut Hatetris for another variant of the theme) An excellent chance to use my Wordle solver based on optimizing information gain (ie guessing to minimize the number of words remaining in a worst case scenario) Since this is essentially Wordle golf, my score was 5. RAVED SPLIT BUNCO BOOBY BOOZY His dictionary is missing some of the SGB wordlist ...

qntm's novel "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is one of the best things I read last year. https://qntm.org/scp

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#16

I was literally playing with the idea of 'Adversarial Worlde', as I also called it, yesterday! Except it was multiplayer with one player being randomly assigned either the role of the guesser or the role of the defender. Then I learnt that the inventor of Wordle is named Josh Wardle, which could be a portmanteau of war and wordle.

Mastermind? :-)

I think similar to wordle, but the defender can change the word being guessed at will as long as they don't invalidate any previous response.

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#17
We used to play a 2-player version of wordle as kids decades ago, on paper. You could do it yourself with plain paper, but it was also sold as a game with pre-printed paper and other supplies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jotto

Apparently it was invented in 1955.

If wonder if anyone still has any kind of patent or other IP that would be relevant...

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#18

Still love seeing Sam's stuff show up in my world! (Check iut Hatetris for another variant of the theme) An excellent chance to use my Wordle solver based on optimizing information gain (ie guessing to minimize the number of words remaining in a worst case scenario) Since this is essentially Wordle golf, my score was 5. RAVED SPLIT BUNCO BOOBY BOOZY His dictionary is missing some of the SGB wordlist ...

I scraped qntm's wordlist and fed it to my tool, I think it does the same thing as yours (minimize the worst case after a guess... the simple greedy algorithm).

The simple greedy algorithm choses NARES first, then DOILY, then TOUCH.

And then it is left with VOUCH, COUCH, POUCH, GOUCH, MOUCH. This solver algorithm is far from optimal. It is like a 1-ply chess solver.

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#19

I’ve taken six guesses four times and eight twice. It’s so very tempting to solve it, finding the quickest path, or at least a local maximum if brute-forcing the entire thing turns out to be too computationally prohibitive.

I would bet that it has already been soft-solved by kthejoker2 upthread who got it in 5 guesses. I can't conceive of 3 wrong words being enough to narrow it down to a single possibility.

Soft-solved in that he doesn't necessarily have a proof this is the optimal solution, nor an enumeration of all optimal solutions, nor the optimal play from any game state - so there's still plenty to be explored here

I wonder if the author can improve the adversarial methodology to prevent a solution in 5. Eg, being left with BLACK/FLACK/SLACK as options is worse than having TRACE/BRACE/TRACK/CRACK, because the former requires 3 guesses to solve and the latter can be done in two. (Maybe this example is impossible because of TRACT, but I'm certain this effect exists).

Re: Adversarial Wordle

#20
This is great! A few days ago, I wrote a Wordle solver in C. It selects a word to minimize the number of words assuming the worst-case green/yellow.

So, it sounds like these two are in direct conflict. My solver is deterministic, and it looks like the adversarial is too, so they always play the same game:

    S E R A I (0 green, 0 yellow, 429 words remain)
    M O L D Y (1 green, 0 yellow, 35 words remain)
    C E N T U (0 greem, 2 yellow, 2 words remain)
    V O U C H (4 green, 0 yellow, 1 word remains)
    P O U C H (5 green, 0 yellow, 0 words remain)
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