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Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

lockwood.dev

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Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

#21

Post by tomlockwood »

npinsker wrote: post #16

I wrote a solver a few weeks ago that solves easy mode in 3.45 guesses and hard mode in 3.55 guesses. Rather than using heuristics, it explored a large portion of the game tree (with a little pruning) and I'm hopeful that it's optimal. Interestingly, the EV-optimal hard mode strategy takes 3.52 guesses on average, but requires 7 guesses a tiny fraction of the time, so I instead exposed the best strategy that always r…

Oh dang! I was guessing that the optimal approach would be under 3.5 for easy mode, but was expecting it to be closer to 3! Amazing work. My next go at the problem is in Rust, which I am a total newcomer to. Thanks for sharing!

Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

#22

Post by Grustaf »

As many have mentioned, it seems much more efficient to focus on eliminating letters, which means that the second word should not be very green at all.

Also, since there's only one word a day, I think we can assume that it's chosen manually, and it won't be some archaic anglo-saxon tool for shoeing horses or something, it will be a relatively common word.

Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

#25

Post by tomlockwood »

Grustaf wrote: post #22

As many have mentioned, it seems much more efficient to focus on eliminating letters, which means that the second word should not be very green at all. Also, since there's only one word a day, I think we can assume that it's chosen manually, and it won't be some archaic anglo-saxon tool for shoeing horses or something, it will be a relatively common word.

I think it's chosen based on a random number generated from the date - but one of the most recent games had the answer "REBUS", which I've never heard or read before. But yeah, the target list has many more common words in it than the list of all possible guesses.

Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

#26

Post by tomlockwood »

CarVac wrote: post #24

It looks like the losing cases are those where in hard mode you can easily get 4 of the letters correct but you have more potential words than guesses left.

Yeah, it requires more analysis but I think counterintuitively many of the games that go up to 5-6 are ones where the initial guesses get a lot of greens, effectively making the remaining guesses a set of 50/50s.

Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

#27

Post by yardstick »

Grustaf wrote: post #22

As many have mentioned, it seems much more efficient to focus on eliminating letters, which means that the second word should not be very green at all. Also, since there's only one word a day, I think we can assume that it's chosen manually, and it won't be some archaic anglo-saxon tool for shoeing horses or something, it will be a relatively common word.

It’s chosen from a sequential list of words in the source code. Each word was vetted by the woman this game was originally made for.

See the NY Times article: http://web.archive.org/web/20220106042510/https://www.nytime...

Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

#28

Post by tomlockwood »

s_Hogg wrote: post #17

This is really interesting, well done :) As it stands, it seems like your algo will always use the same first guess, have you thought about making that configurable and seeing what happens with e.g. the number of words where it gets stuck and runs out of time?

Get to work Mr. Hogg!

Yeah, next program will effectively do this but in an utterly insane way. Shall we brunch to discuss soon?

Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

#29

Post by matthewfelgate »

Thanks for sharing.

I have a feeling that a perfect algorithm should be able to solve all wordles in 4 guesses. (but I might be wrong)

The problem with a lot of approaches is they seem to locally optimise for each guess rather than optimise over all the guesses (if that makes sense?)

I get the feeling guessing the most frequent letters might not be the best approach, because does it cut down the number of possible words much?

My intuition tells me if you have the right first 3 guesses you should be able to cut the dataset down to 1 possible answer every time.

However I don't know how to program it.

Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

#30

Post by speg »

Grustaf wrote: post #22

As many have mentioned, it seems much more efficient to focus on eliminating letters, which means that the second word should not be very green at all. Also, since there's only one word a day, I think we can assume that it's chosen manually, and it won't be some archaic anglo-saxon tool for shoeing horses or something, it will be a relatively common word.

It says it is designed for hard mode, in which I believe you must use your green (and maybe yellow?) letters.
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