My manual average is 3.28. Smaller sample count than these solvers of course.
Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
111–120 of 181 posts
Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey! Don't say you aren't a real programmer! I learnt how to program in my spare time at an industrial site, using Excel! Excel runs the world, and a few years ago I got a programming contract because I had that VBA knowledge! That same company was so impressed that I eventually got a full time job with them. I am still a full time programmer to this day. So, keep working at it! Excel is real programming and javascri…
Hey thanks for the success story & words of encouragement.. you are the hero!! The file; I was wondering how can I access the list in my javascript bookmarklet, which I can run on his game page. I mean i can define the whole list in my own variable in my bookmarklet, but sure it is going to be over the character limit of a bookmarklet. How, when the game page is loaded, one can access that variable in console log? I…
Ahhh for that problem, I am not sure! Best of luck!
Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
#113If you right off the bat guess "bound" and then positions 2, 3, 4, and 5 all come up green, then your goal needs to then be to use words like 'morse' to rule out (in one fell swoop) words like 'sound', 'mound' and 'round'. Then, if it's not ruled out, you can then choose words that just have m and s, or s and r.
This is a valid strategy in easy (default) mode, but in "hard" mode, you must use all yellow/green letters in subsequent guesses
This is why hard mode is a less interesting way to play.
Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
#114Going for greens is a good heuristic, but the general solution is to seek guesses that shrink the size of the set of compatible words the most. https://langproc.substack.com/p/information-theoretic-analys...
Using essentially this method I get that the best initial guess is RAISE (there are some others that are very close). It seems the author of this post didn’t use the actual word list from the game so got a different word.
For me, ARISE and RAISE were equally good.
Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
#115I 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…
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…
If two players are competing in a single round of wordle, then surely the player who guesses the correct word in the fewer number of guesses wins, right? Then it seems natural to say that the better of two players is the one with the most wins after playing all possible rounds.
The only problem is that I think this definition leads to the possibility of non-transitivity, where A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A.
Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
#116Earlier 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…
IMO, never losing the game is the bare minimum for any reasonable cost function: never take > 6 guesses. Beyond that, you can have different optimization functions based on whether you're trying to minimize the worst-case depth of the decision tree (number of guesses) for each position, or the average depth, or some other reasonable function of the distribution over number of guesses. Although you could have arbitrar…
> IMO, never losing the game is the bare minimum for any reasonable cost function: never take > 6 guesses.
I wouldn’t think so. If I get 99.9% of rounds correct with 3 guesses (and fail to find a solution to 0.1% of the rounds), and you get 100% of rounds with 6 guesses, I’d say I’ve soundly defeated you 99.9% of the time.
Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a data engineer, I sometimes run into problems like this, but I generally find that 99.9% of them can be solved "well enough" in python, or in a database. Moving code from Python to Rust or similar has been required only a handful of times. This specific task, the next program I'm working on, seems to be a very "algo" based, comp sci type problem. I think most companies want to say that they have these kind of pro…
A company I know hired a computer science PhD after putting them through the full programmer interview, including whiteboarding algos, etc. Literally the hardest crap that anyone working there could think up, and then hired the programmer who got the best score on the test, and the process took multiple months to find this magic individual who could score high enough to satisfy everyone. Once hired (at a fantastic sa…
Wonder what company that was haha :)
Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
#118Isn't an optimal first word one with plenty of vowels?
Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
#119I posted a similar bot and tools and analysis a while back.
It solves in 3.45 moves on average, 5 or fewer moves always, and uses 5 moves less than 2% of the time.
The core parts are very fast, using bitwise tricks for filtering, uses caching throughout to reduce computation, and is fully multithreaded.
Re: Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time
#120It’s because you’re using sets — the reason why the author mentioned things are out of order.
>> A set is a collection which is unordered, unchangeable*, and unindexed. [0]