Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Best Wordle guessing strategy

slc.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 159 posts

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#11

Post by ledauphin »

biesnecker wrote: post #6

Over the weekend I wrote a tool to help me figure this out: https://github.com/biesnecker/wordlesmith Wordle's wordlist is interesting. There is a large (~10,000 words) list of words that it will accept as guesses but that will never be the answer, and a much smaller (~2500 words) list of words it will both accept and could be the answer. My tool's simple algorithm scores words by taking the product of the frequency…

One of the things noted by the OP is that you can get stuck in a rut if you don't do more info-gathering than just the first word.

I would recommend not even trying to guess the word on attempt 2 - much better almost always to guess 5 totally different letters.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#12

Post by ncmncm »

ledauphin wrote: post #2

I did some work on this as well. One thing I think this analysis seems to be missing is taking into account letter position within the word set. If you take that into account, it actually shifts the first guesses, since you're far better off to discover a green square than a yellow one. There are some pretty weird words that pop up if you do this analysis, so I've settled on some that are slightly suboptimal but won'…

I bet "s" in final position is much rarer than in typical text, because Wardle seems (reasonably!) to prefer base words over plurals, as well as past tense, participle, and other modifications.

For me the most useful immediate information is about vowels, making "adieu" quite useful. But "irate" and "inter" are also pretty good.

Most people focus on the yellow and green results, but the grey results can be even more informative. A grey result doesn't just tell you about its own position, but about all five. So each grey result from the first guess rules out huge swaths of the dictionary.

The more letters from ETAOIN SHRDLU you can cram into the first two guesses, the better off you are. Thus, any letters in color on the first guess would be wasted if repeated in the second word.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#13

Post by vple »

I also wrote a tool for playing: https://github.com/vple/wordle-solver/blob/main/solver.js

There's probably more tuning I can do for the algo, but roughly:

- I took all the words from the site's js as the dictionary.

- From remaining eligible words, compute the letter distribution (ignoring letters you already know are in the solution).

- Pick a word that uses as many of the most frequent letters as possible.

- Use one of those as a guess.

The goal is essentially to greedily reduce the remaining candidate words as much as possible per guess.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#15

Post by jackson1442 »

paxys wrote: post #10

I don't like the "exploration" strategy of playing Wordle. Once you have a start word, work onwards from there (aka "hard mode") rather than enter another random guess to narrow down more letters. I know it is a valid strategy, but idk just feels like cheating to me.

Agreed. That strategy hasn't failed me yet, and it definitely makes me think a little harder.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#16

Post by MauranKilom »

It seems clear to me that there is an optimal starting word, but that the best second word has to depend on the info you gain from the first.

Case in point: If you get 3 green 2 yellow in the first word, you can solve on the next guess.

Of course, you can constrain your strategies to "I always use the same two/three starting words", and in many cases that will be fine. But it's quite obviously not optimal.

Also, the optimal strategy must depend on your goal metric. Do you go for "least average guesses", "least maximum guesses", or "least average guesses while never losing"? There's lots of unstated assumptions in all the analyses thrown around...

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#18

Post by ledauphin »

ncmncm wrote: post #12
ledauphin wrote: post #2

I did some work on this as well. One thing I think this analysis seems to be missing is taking into account letter position within the word set. If you take that into account, it actually shifts the first guesses, since you're far better off to discover a green square than a yellow one. There are some pretty weird words that pop up if you do this analysis, so I've settled on some that are slightly suboptimal but won'…

I bet "s" in final position is much rarer than in typical text, because Wardle seems (reasonably!) to prefer base words over plurals, as well as past tense, participle, and other modifications. For me the most useful immediate information is about vowels, making "adieu" quite useful. But "irate" and "inter" are also pretty good. Most people focus on the yellow and green results, but the grey results can be even more…

We all draw our lines somewhere different, of course, but to my mind, taking into account Wardle's specific choices as exposed in the source code feels like cheating, vs taking the full list of 5 letter words that his code "accepts".

Knowing what answers are actually "true" ahead of time is more information than I'm comfortable taking advantage of.

And yes, eliminating letters is crucial - in my opinion it's always better to guess 5 totally new letters for the second word.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#19

Post by jsmeaton »

paxys wrote: post #10

I don't like the "exploration" strategy of playing Wordle. Once you have a start word, work onwards from there (aka "hard mode") rather than enter another random guess to narrow down more letters. I know it is a valid strategy, but idk just feels like cheating to me.

Agree. I used one of the strategies over a couple of days and it took all of the fun out of the game. Switching to hard mode brought all of that fun right back.

If you're going to write a program to optimise your guesses then why not just go to the source and pull the answer straight from the encoded answer list? I know people derive fun from these things in different ways but that's kind of where I landed.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#20

Post by lucideer »

I've spoken to a lot of people who say they take this "exploration" strategy, but I think it misses the human language element of deduction.

I've been playing Wordle for a while and while I'm no wordsmith, if you take an analytical strategy to word selection from line 2 onward it's never that difficult to get 3/6 (which I presume is the highest score attainable without significant luck).

English is one of the most irregular languages, with so many influences and variations, but it still has structure and common patterns. Once you have knowledge from a well selected exploratory 1st line, there's a lot you can deduct about potential variants in the word structure of the answer to make an informed 2nd line choice that'll be dual purpose: both being a good exploratory word and also a reasonably hopeful lucky guess.

Afterall, if you're aiming for 4/6 you're not really aiming very high.

Post reply on HN