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Best Wordle guessing strategy

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Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#111

Post by Arnavion »

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's because a) the word list is hard-coded in the game's JS, so anyone can see it with "View Source", and b) the list is indexed based on the current day (as reported by the JS) and wraps around to the start.

So you don't just have solutions for the next several months. You have all the solutions ever :)

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#112

Post by Kiro »

Always trying a new first word every day makes it much more fun imo. I love sitting with a blank Wordle and just let my mind try to settle on a random 5-letter word from my subconscious.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#113

Post by [deleted] »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #93
lucideer wrote: post #20

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 ir…

100% agree. Wordle is not a hard game - it has a pleasing mix of luck and skill, and while all the theories and strategising are interesting, none of them are really necessary. I don't understand the "exploration" strategy at all - playing "hard mode" means every guess is a possible winner. I've done about 30 now and my highest amount of guesses was 5 when I had the "ank" of CRANK and from there it was pure guessing…

[deleted]

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#114

Post by ghusbands »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #27

You could probably have fun with Player 1) create a predictable process that can guess wordle words Player 2) given the full code of 1 find a word that will not be found by that process in 6 steps The game is over if someone can decide a process that catches all valid 5 letter words in 6 steps.

I believe there are already plenty of solvers doing it in five steps, worst case, as in [1]. I don't think any are doing it in four, but I doubt anyone has yet demonstrated that four is impossible.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29890845

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#115

Post by PennRobotics »

nwiswell wrote: post #50
codefined wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, doing a similar analysis where we bucketed each word into 243 (3^5) buckets based on the possible result, we found "RAISE" as the best word. Source[0] [0] https://gist.github.com/popey456963/a654e98d0180566b897b70ee...

RAISE also sounds pretty plausible. How is the score calculated? What is the trade-off between expectation greens / expectation yellows? Intuitively I expect that greens are significantly more "valuable" than yellows, since they reduce the search space much more... Maybe this is all the wrong approach and the right metric is how many legal answers remain after the first guess?

I would say that the distribution of yellow letters in the remaining word determines the value. If you have a yellow "X" or "Q" or one yellow vowel after testing all 5 vowels, that is a lot more meaningful than a yellow "T", which could really go anywhere. A yellow "G" but grey "I" tells me (at least intuitively, not quantitatively) a bit more than a green "I" and grey "G".

A recent word had a single vowel. This made it reasonably easy to guess where those vowels could go and to also choose a consonant-heavy next word that would really tear apart the search space if even one consonant was valid.

I think I'll switch to using RAISE or SLATE as a first choice. It was ADIEU before, but there's almost never an A in slot 1, U in slot 5, or D in slot 2, and I don't feel like any of these letters has a significantly most common position with just the info from these 5 letters. The yellow/grey letters are helpful after ADIEU, but I still need to explore at least 4 more letters (including O, and usually N or C) to even get a good idea of where any matches might go. In the moments that letter 4 is "E" while guessing ADIEU on round 1, that actually doesn't help me much with round 2. In fact, then I'm faced with the decision to explore unguessed letters in general, words with two "E"s, and/or words with "E" in 4th position. (same with "I" in 3rd)

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#116

Post by petercooper »

bejd wrote: post #110
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!

I saw that, but I had naively assumed it would at least not be in the right order and some sort of date based hash would be used to shuffle it up.. ha! The simplest things..

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#117

Post by ghusbands »

thurn wrote: post #89

I also did this and also got AEROS/UNLIT (well, AROSE/UNTIL in my case). You've made the same minor error I did of looking at the frequency distribution of all guessable wordle words, not the smaller list of possible answers , which has a different frequency distribution. If you look at that you get ORATE/LYSIN as the best starting pair (based on frequency only, not considering position)

Calling not cheating an "error" is odd. The hypothetical game is one in which any valid word could be the answer. If you're going to use the list of answers, just look up the answer for today's date and get it right on the first guess.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#119

Post by EveYoung »

nwiswell wrote: post #50
codefined wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, doing a similar analysis where we bucketed each word into 243 (3^5) buckets based on the possible result, we found "RAISE" as the best word. Source[0] [0] https://gist.github.com/popey456963/a654e98d0180566b897b70ee...

RAISE also sounds pretty plausible. How is the score calculated? What is the trade-off between expectation greens / expectation yellows? Intuitively I expect that greens are significantly more "valuable" than yellows, since they reduce the search space much more... Maybe this is all the wrong approach and the right metric is how many legal answers remain after the first guess?

I've implemented your last suggestion of scoring words by how much they reduce the pool of potential candidates (12k+). Testing it against the 1,000 most frequent words (targets), the word LORES seems to work best on average.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#120

Post by [deleted] »

hddqsb wrote: post #103

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…

[deleted]
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