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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

#161

Post by bbasketball »

BoorishBears wrote: post #75
bbasketball wrote: post #23

If you like Wordle you should check out https://wordhoot.com/

I thought the UI of Wordle wasn't anything special but this makes me appreciate the subtle attention to detail that went into it That website you linked doesn't lock the viewport so on my phone it's constantly panning or randomly zooming And the grid instead a keyboard layout actually matters more than I expected for how easy it is to type Having to manually start a game is a tiny thing but doesn't feel as smooth

It's click to start because it has a timer. Hmm, I'm not seeing the other issues.

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

#162

Post by oceliker »

tomlockwood wrote: post #25
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.

I am pretty sure the list is sequential. If you look at the list in the Javascript code of the game and Ctrl-F today's word, you'll see the previous dates' words are right before it. Here's tomorrow's word (spoiler alert, obv): https://pastebin.com/sfQ7x5ya

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

#163

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?

Well this is embarrassing.

The event listener was using event.target which wasn't the correct node when you hit the icon. I have fixed this now!

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

#164

Post by julianwachholz »

SamBam wrote: post #127
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?

Doesn't work for me either, after many clicks. macOS 11.6, Chrome 96.0.4664.55.

Super embarrassing. I fixed this now. I used event.target which was just the SVG of the icon if you clicked that instead of the text. (I also split the share button in two to make it easier to share)

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

#165

Post by FR10 »

richardfey wrote: post #150

Anyone can please fill me in on why I am seeing a daily wordle post on HN for the past week or so? Is there a competition that I missed?

At least in my household (and some groupchats) its become like a fun daily ritual, it takes just 5-10 minutes to play and post it, and you can only play once a day.

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

#166

Post by vba616 »

sanitycheck wrote: post #149
vba616 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That would depend on whether the company was doing something that needed to be done, wouldn't it? Which should be clear before a person starts.

If something has to be done, then avoiding it makes you "smart" like avoiding taxes makes you "smart".

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

#168

Post by thxg »

hnkain wrote: post #154
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…

It's a bit disappointing that there's been many writeups of heuristic-based solvers make the front page, but the writeup of an exact solver doesn't make it. [Note: I was the person who submitted the link to the exact solver writeup to HN]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006724

Just to make things extra clear, the post we are commenting on has

- 99.4% in 6 guesses or less

- 3.64 guesses average

- no attempt of any formal optimality result,

while the one you posted has:

- not just 100% in 6 guesses or less (so 100% wins not 99.4%), but actually 100% in 5 guesses or less!!!

- 3.42 guesses average

- a fairly convincing optimality proof (as far as average is concerned) which was apparently the only hard part computationally.

- it also had 3 upvotes until i cross-references it here, and barely more now.

- the author seems to have plenty of twitter followers, none of which seemed to care much.

And yet if you look at the "new" page, the flow of heuristics keeps coming. Conclude what you will :-).

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

#169

Post by tshaddox »

guipsp wrote: post #147
tshaddox wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, where "some value of better" is "wins in the overwhelming majority of rounds."

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

#170

Post by tshaddox »

svat wrote: post #124
tshaddox wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Right, that point of view makes sense if you imagine two players separately playing Wordle and comparing their results, and indeed that's what the OP may have been thinking. But as far as I know, Wordle is primarily a game for one player to play against the computer, where eventually getting to the word (or not) is the most prominent outcome (the only notion of "win" or "defeat" in the game itself), and solving it in…

Indeed, it’s essentially a single player game, but we’re talking about which bot a player would want to use which is inherently a notion of bots competing against each other.
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