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

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

#61

Post by julianwachholz »

depaulagu wrote: post #54
julianwachholz wrote: post #53

Wordle is a perfect example of nerd sniping, I couldn't stop playing once I started. But I wanted to challenge my friends to some more difficult puzzles and wrote a tiny tool this weekend to do just that! You can create your own Wordle-like puzzles on https://word.rodeo I've already received a ton of positive feedback from friends. What are your thoughts?

It's not copying the URL to my clipboard, would it be possible to expose the url as text so manual copying can be done?

My partner noticed this too, but after a couple of tries the same button will work again. Really hard to debug unfortunately. It usually worked after a couple of tries. I just pushed a fix that greys out the link if there's no URL, hopefully that helps?

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

#62

Post by pxx »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #36

See also Absurdle, an adversarial Wordle that is designed to be as difficult as possible: https://qntm.org/files/wordle/ I won't spoil how it works, but click the "?" button on the page if you want to know.

It's designed to be, but it isn't necessarily, as it uses the size of the remaining solution set as a heuristic for how many guesses are needed to split it. There are better, more exhaustive searches of the solution space now.

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

#64

Post by itrulia »

julianwachholz wrote: post #53

Wordle is a perfect example of nerd sniping, I couldn't stop playing once I started. But I wanted to challenge my friends to some more difficult puzzles and wrote a tiny tool this weekend to do just that! You can create your own Wordle-like puzzles on https://word.rodeo I've already received a ton of positive feedback from friends. What are your thoughts?

Love it

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

#66

Post by thxg »

thxg wrote: post #33

This [1] solves it in 3.4212 average guesses 100% of the time and claims optimality, which is 99% of the difficulty it seems. For the limited 2671-word set of possible words, I think the question is now settled (for the whole 12k-word set, I don't think anyone tried anything). It was posted here four days ago [2]. [1] http://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best_... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/ite…

Ok, I found this one [1] with 100% wins on the whole 12k-word set. But it optimizes for worst-case, not average.

[1] https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle/

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

#68

Post by pxx »

hervature wrote: post #60
hgibbs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a point of curiosity, what do you mean by optimal? To me, I can see at least two (potentially different) cost functions that a Wordle strategy can aim to minimise. Firstly, you can try to minimise the expected number of guesses, and secondly you can try to minimise the expected number of guesses conditional on never losing the game. In principle you could optimise for the first but not the second by allowing a sma…

Funnily enough, I think neither of those notions are the correct thing to optimize. For me, you want to minimize the maximum number of guesses. This leads to an equilibrium. Otherwise, your opponent can just abuse your strategy.

Isn't that just #2, but changing the definition of losing to be the least number of rounds where you can always win (which for Wordle is 5)? These small changes to the definition don't seem to change ev (or the code needed to generate it) that much.

If you don't care about optimizing the EV at all, the greedy tree already has the property you're interested in.

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

#70

Post by pxx »

ford wrote: post #15
amluto wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to get really fancy, a full minimax solution is probably feasible without massive resources. Pretend it’s a two player game with one player guessing and the other player thinking of a potentially different word for each guess subject to the constraint of being consistent with all previous answers.

There is a wordle parody (absurdle) [0] that does exactly this. [0] https://qntm.org/files/wordle/

No it does not. It uses a heuristic at every layer of the tree. Specifically, instead of recursing down each subtree, it chooses the set with the maximum number of remaining elements, which isn't necessarily the set that is most difficult to split.
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