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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

#141

Post by julianwachholz »

BoorishBears wrote: post #76
julianwachholz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Can you really not just share the url and at most pre-highlight it? On my phone I get a share sheet with additional text which makes visiting the url a pain

It's a normal anchor tag so you can right click or long press it to copy the link!

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

#142

Post by tomlockwood »

Grustaf wrote: post #140
tomlockwood wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common word? What's your source for that claim?

Kindergarten? https://kidpillar.com/free-rebus-puzzles-for-kids/

This website looks like it's target audience is five year olds, to you?

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

#143

Post by RivieraKid »

noxvilleza wrote: post #89
RivieraKid wrote: post #8

Why not simply choose a guess which narrows the set of possible solutions the most? This could be improved by looking one step further, but this would probably require some kind of optimization / heuristic / approximation to make it computationally feasible.

Narrowing the search space greedily doesn't solve the problem optimally, because the size of the search space is just a heuristic. Some search spaces of size X might be more difficult to reduce further than another search space of size Y (for Y < X). This is more apparent in hard mode where you have a very limited guess-pool. The greedy heuristic approach would work fine if all possible 5-letter combinations were val…

I know, like I said in my comment, this greedy strategy could be improved.

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

#144

Post by tomlockwood »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #138
cortesoft wrote: post #97

Everyone is having these really interesting conversations... but no one has explained what Wordle is :(

Its explained in the link. Go play it. its quite fun.

I added the explanation as a direct result of the comment you're responding to.

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

#145

Post by rob74 »

tshaddox wrote: post #116
svat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you look at the failed attempts in the article, you'll see it's not so easy to get 100% correct with 6 guesses. For example:

SLATE, CRONY, HOUND, BOUND, POUND, MOUND (correct: WOUND)

SLATE, SHARE, SHAME, SHAPE, SHAKE, SHADE (correct: SHAVE)

...so sometimes even if it gets 4 of 5 letters right on the second try, it still has too many options left. Of course in cases like this it could go "one step back" and try a word with (most of) the letters that are different between these words (HBPMW or MPKDV). So try different words until the number of options is narrowed down sufficiently.

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

#146

Post by nerdo »

Humphrey wrote: post #81
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…

It fails with the word "frogs", as it tells me it is "gross"

Frogs isn't in the wordle list: https://github.com/tomlockwood/wordle-solve/blob/main/lib/wo...

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

#147

Post by guipsp »

tshaddox wrote: post #134
balls187 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d say I’ve soundly defeated you 99.9% of the time. Except it wouldn't be 99.9% of the time. Just the games were you guessed fewer than GP. GP's solver would expect to guess the correct word 100% of the time in fewer than 6 guess, but not that it would always take 6 guesses.

I was saying if you hypothetically got every correct guess in exactly 6 tries. You would pass the suggested “bare minimum” while my 99.9% strategy doesn’t, yet I claim my strategy is better.

For some value of better, sure.

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

#148

Post by AlexanderTheGr8 »

A very naive solver is giving me 3.289 guesses on average.

What I did was simply sort the word_list based on frequency analysis. The guess is always the first word in the list (with the highest score) After each guess, I update the list based on the results (gray, yellow, green)

For the final test, I just looped through each word in the list and played the game for that word. My algorithm got every single word (2315 words) in 7614 total guesses giving an average guess of 3.298

Right now, I am only using the list of final_words. I believe that I can get better results by using the list of attempt_words to reduce the number of possibilities, and then using final_words to give final guesses. So maybe the first 2 guesses will be using the attempt_words and then the guesses after that will be from final_words. Or maybe keep guessing from attempt_words until the list length is below a certain number and then start guessing from final_words. Something along these lines will give better results.

In my freq analysis, I also accounted for the freq on each index.

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

#149

Post by sanitycheck »

vba616 wrote: post #126
dvasdekis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have trouble believing that story. An adult, who is also a super genius just says "I was given..." and quits? That's so passive! You have one CD drive and assume that's it, nothing can be done, that's all the resources in the whole company? Don't talk to anyone?

Perhaps evaluating the situation and leaving immediately shows just how smart they were!
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