Best Wordle guessing strategy • Hacker News Board

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#101

Post by IMAYousaf » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 7:23 AM UTC

I personally always start with the word OUIJA.

From there it's simple to rotate if any of the vowels get picked up into words with common non-vowels like S and T etc.

If no vowel appears out of OUIA, I always go for a word like STREP.

Becomes relatively trivial from there.

Today (01/13/2022) the word was ABBEY.

I'll represent GREEN squares with * and GREY squares with ^

It went as follows:

OUIJA^ B^E^A^ST FA^B*LE^ ABBEY

After FABLE, the first word I could think of that had at least 1 A, at least 1 B, and at least one E was ABBEY.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#102

Post by Tijdreiziger » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 8:29 AM UTC

natch wrote: post #45

I'm looking for the best strategy for guessing which Wordle app in the App Store is the real one.

None: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/12/wordle-is-being-punished-b...

Discussed yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29906892

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#103

Post by hddqsb » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 9:15 AM UTC

Interesting post, but the premise is misleading. The title says "Best ... strategy" and the first sentence reads "This post will derive an optimal ... strategy", but there is nothing to suggest that this strategy is optimal.

One strategy which is obviously optimal is to use minimax (recursively, not like Knuth's Mastermind strategy which was mentioned by @christiangenco), however this strategy is not computationally feasible.

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Aside: There is something broken with this site's history manipulation. When I open the blog post it creates two entries in the history list, and clicking the browser's back button takes me to a page with the same URL as the blog post that displays "Error Page Not Found".

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#104

Post by strstr » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 9:46 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #85

Syzygies wrote: post #65

5.291 soare 5.294 roate 5.299 raise 5.311 raile 5.311 reast 5.321 slate 5.342 crate 5.342 salet 5.345 irate 5.346 trace 5.356 arise 5.360 orate 5.370 stare 5.382 carte 5.390 raine 5.400 caret 5.402 ariel 5.406 taler 5.406 carle 5.407 slane Shown are the twenty best initial guesses using Claude Shannon's definition of information entropy. Each number is the expected number of yes/no questions needed to resolve the rem…

Which word list did you use?

I believe tares is the optimal word (according to shannon entropy) from the game’s list.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#105

Post by kzrdude » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 10:04 AM UTC

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.

Without exploring, I just can't see any words that fit the known letters. I might not have that great imagination of words, or be that good to fit them to fixed clues.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#106

Post by ralferoo » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 10:23 AM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #38

This strategy optimizes for figuring out all the letters that are used in today’s word. But that’s not the goal of the game, it’s finding one word in particular. Those sound similar but are not. In the example given, the first guess already told you there is an E, but then it’s not used in the next guesses. Figuring out the position of that letter, instead of trying to find a third one, will massively reduce your sea…

> Lucky streak? My starting word is BACON.

I see what you did there

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#107

Post by mar_3104 » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 10:27 AM UTC

SPADE WROTH CLIMB FUNKY

Left:GJQVXZ

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#108

Post by oli5679 » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 10:46 AM UTC

If it wasn't for the 6-guess limit and you had a vocabulary, then you could use minimax to try and minimize the maximum number of guesses.

E.g. assuming you make the best possible future guesses but your opponent has chosen the least convenient word and propitiating up these minimum and maximums.

I am trying to think if this can be tweaked?

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#109

Post by petercooper » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 10:46 AM UTC

Like many, I spent some time thinking about this, and realized if I could analyze the words used so far, I could find some patterns. For example, the creator might not ever use plurals meaning RATES might not be such a helpful starting word with the S.

So I Googled the last several solutions to find such a list and instead I found... a gist where someone had reverse engineered the game and put up a list of every solution, including for the next several months. On the plus side, I now don't spend time on the game.. but this is perhaps a warning to not go down the rabbit hole yourself if you want to keep playing ;-)

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#110

Post by bejd » Fri, Jan 14, 2022, 10:55 AM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #109

Like many, I spent some time thinking about this, and realized if I could analyze the words used so far, I could find some patterns. For example, the creator might not ever use plurals meaning RATES might not be such a helpful starting word with the S. So I Googled the last several solutions to find such a list and instead I found... a gist where someone had reverse engineered the game and put up a list of every solu…

It probably didn't take a lot of reverse engineering: the solution list is stored in plaintext in the site's javascript!