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I thought this was old news? I remember people making videos about using information theory to solve Wordle back when it was particularly hyped. (After writing this I checked, there's even a 3 blue 1 brown video on this) My favourite along those lines was solving wordle in 1 guess using the distribution of coloured squares on social media https://www.kaggle.com/code/benhamner/wordle-1-6
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd quickly realised that a set of words which covered most of the alphabet (20 words, leaving b, g, j, q, v, and z excluded) allowed solving virtually all Wordle puzzles. The game quickly lost any challenge. You can even go further—there's a set of 5 words which uses 25 out of 26 possible letters, leaving you one more word to enter the right answer. But here's the thing: while that means you'll almost always win,…
The only virtuous goal is to type some fun words imo.
What I'm interested in is the best starting word. Using Shannon entropy, the paper finds that it is "tares".
"tears" 6.00570508021708 "teras" 5.95925128791865 "teals" 5.90122552646963 "tares" 5.88711668336419 "lears" 5.86158270234831
Using another metric which I called consistency (I think it was just minimizing the biggest bucket possible afterwards, trying to beat absurdle fast), the best starting word was tied between "arise", "raise", "aesir", "reais" and "serai". All of these have a worst-case scenario of 168 valid words remaining.
I find it interesting that different implementations seem to come up with slightly different rankings. Maybe the dictionaries are different?
I thought this was old news? I remember people making videos about using information theory to solve Wordle back when it was particularly hyped. (After writing this I checked, there's even a 3 blue 1 brown video on this) My favourite along those lines was solving wordle in 1 guess using the distribution of coloured squares on social media https://www.kaggle.com/code/benhamner/wordle-1-6
Yes 3blue1brown made a series of videos which explains it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v68zYyaEmEA ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRed0Xmc2Wg .
I always started with 3 words
POINT LASED CRUMB
This eliminates not only the most frequent letters but least frequent letters (Bloom filter), leaving rest of infrequent letter set to guess by narrow deduction.
Never failed me.