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Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

vaghetti.dev

191–200 of 271 posts

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#192

I may be completely wrong but, after playing 3 or 4 times, I got the feeling that this game is very easy and involves more luck than skill or strategy. It looks and feels like a puzzle so you get the feeling of having solved something but have you, really? If you find the word in 3 tries 90% of the time, does it mean you're actually better at the game than someone who usually needs 4 or 5 attempts? Or are you just a…

There is a strategy, but I found it ridiculously easy to pick up. At first I was just guessing randomly and sometimes including double-letter words etc. Now I consistently get it in 3-4 guesses but my actual score seems to depend on luck. It feels like I've solved the puzzle and now just going through the motions doing it again and again. A bit like speed solving a Rubik's cube once you've figured out an algorithm ma…

Rubik's cube speed-solver and wordle enthusiast here.

Wordle solving is considerably more demanding. It's more like trying to solve a cube in fewest moves. If I would have to compare mindlessness of speed cubing to a word-based activity it would be speed-typing.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#194
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It (the old version at least), is pure client-side... just download a copy and never worry about it going away.

ooh interesting - thanks! running from the same seed do you think, or a list that will iterate in a consistent manner across other users?

It's a hardcoded list, the NYT removed some words but didn't change the rest, so "old wordle" is just a few words behind "NYT wordle"

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#196
What has been driving me a little nuts about it is the amount of luck involved with getting the word in a few tries. I can reliably get the word in 4 tries give or take. But when you hit something equivalent to *AR you can guess BAR, CAR, PAR, MAR, TAR, JAR, FAR, etc. The number of times I got 4 out of 5 letters on the second try just to finally get the word on the 5th or 6th try feels like I am cheated of a victory.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#197

What has been driving me a little nuts about it is the amount of luck involved with getting the word in a few tries. I can reliably get the word in 4 tries give or take. But when you hit something equivalent to *AR you can guess BAR, CAR, PAR, MAR, TAR, JAR, FAR, etc. The number of times I got 4 out of 5 letters on the second try just to finally get the word on the 5th or 6th try feels like I am cheated of a victory.

Pretty inevitable, though; there are some letter groups in english that make that unavoidable.

I use this (the second table).

https://www3.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/letterfr...

I memorised STARE/TASER, UNLID, CHOMP (all the letters with more than 3% incidence, in a word order with a good letter distribution close enough to the statistical one, and some useful letter groups) and the remaining significant ones(GBFYWKV) and work with that.

If I get a green from the first word I assemble a new word from the letters of the other two; this strategy has seen me guess it in two or three a bit more often.

This may be obvious but in your scenario where there are lots of permutations, it's worth considering that you can solve words two ways -- first by thinking of a word that fits the shape available, and second by carefully thinking of the words with the highest frequency unused letters in all available slots (if there are two or three remaining letters, a guess that is likely to provide you two yellows is vastly better than a guess that will provide you one green).

If you use a three word opening gambit (which you can't do in 'hard' mode) then you'll regularly guess it in four or five, anyway. I strongly suspect that four is the most common number of guesses for good players.

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#198

What has been driving me a little nuts about it is the amount of luck involved with getting the word in a few tries. I can reliably get the word in 4 tries give or take. But when you hit something equivalent to *AR you can guess BAR, CAR, PAR, MAR, TAR, JAR, FAR, etc. The number of times I got 4 out of 5 letters on the second try just to finally get the word on the 5th or 6th try feels like I am cheated of a victory.

You could use one guess of BCP to gain more information. That'd eliminate 3-4 out of 7 words in your example with the tradeoffs that you won't win with that guess in particular, but it's better on average

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#199
Not directly related to the article, but I was just wondering what the best word to start wordle with is - and I think it is ATONE.

I arrived there by looking at the most frequent letters in english from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency and putting them into an anagram solver at https://www.thewordfinder.com/anagram-solver/

There is no five letter word from ETAOI (the five most frequent letters) but there are some from ETAOIN (the top six), namely atone, eatin, entia, oaten, tenia and tinea.

Wordle doesn't recognize most of these, but it does recognize atone

Re: Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways

#200
post #19

The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…

I think the full list of words being hardcoded and readily available is not a kind of elegant simplicity, but simply an inelegant compromise to get everything done client-side, which has obvious benefits. It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation.
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