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My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

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Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#111

Post by Affric »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #52
donarb wrote: post #31

My strategy is to never use the same start word, I like using a random word each time as that changes the path to solving. I might pick a random word from another open browser window, maybe from a news article or something like that. If I get stuck after the second or third try, I'll pick another random word, even if it contains a few discarded letters in order to ferret out 1 or 2 more valid letters. For me, the bes…

If my wife and I want to challenge ourselves, we'll start with the solution to the previous puzzle as our first guess.

My group chat does this and I think it leads to the best possible results in terms of fairness.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#113

Post by thaumasiotes »

jmyeet wrote: post #108

I used to start with ADIEU because it contains 4 vowels and the most common ones at that. But I've since moved on from that because I found I would be forced to reuse vowels in words 3 or 4. I'm vaguely tempted to take the dictionary and figure out an optimal strategy that 1) guarantees success and 2) minimizes the number of guesses. If you assume every word is equally possible (it isn't; they're manually chosen) the…

> I also toy around with Quordle where you have 9 guesses to find 4 words. That one's harder and the strategy is a little different. There I've pretty much settled on finding a set of 3 words that covers all vowels (and Y) and 9 of the most common consonants.

Yes, in Quordle you're compelled to use a standard opening. Regardless of what you learn from early guesses, no followup can be more informative than just querying more letters.

It's kind of disappointing to me how much luck is involved in Quordle. I've just established that the only common letters in a word are S, A, and Y, with A second and Y fifth. All three other words are already guessed. Do I guess SASSY or SAVVY? The game gives the appearance of being much more skill-based than it actually is.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#114

Post by lstamour »

timdellinger wrote: post #109

I'll also take this opportunity to plug Semantle, which is an infuriating game that I can't resist. It's based on word2vec. You get infinite guesses, and you're given feedback on how "semantically similar" each guess is. It often takes me 100+ guesses. https://semantle.novalis.org/

Yikes that was hard. To explain to others, the Similarity scores range from -100 to 100, and your goal is to get a similarity score of 100. It says the tenth-nearest has a score of 48-50, that’s a good guide for when you actually have a similar word or not. If you haven’t hit a similarity of at least 50, you’re still close but not there yet. The hints given might not be any good until you hit a similarity in the 40s. Also don’t let guesses with lower similarity scores distract you, the word tends to be a part of, synonym or related word by the time you get to a similarity score in the 50s…

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#115

Post by abecedarius »

timdellinger wrote: post #109

I'll also take this opportunity to plug Semantle, which is an infuriating game that I can't resist. It's based on word2vec. You get infinite guesses, and you're given feedback on how "semantically similar" each guess is. It often takes me 100+ guesses. https://semantle.novalis.org/

also https://www.redactle.com/

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#116

Post by jmyeet »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #113
jmyeet wrote: post #108

I used to start with ADIEU because it contains 4 vowels and the most common ones at that. But I've since moved on from that because I found I would be forced to reuse vowels in words 3 or 4. I'm vaguely tempted to take the dictionary and figure out an optimal strategy that 1) guarantees success and 2) minimizes the number of guesses. If you assume every word is equally possible (it isn't; they're manually chosen) the…

> I also toy around with Quordle where you have 9 guesses to find 4 words. That one's harder and the strategy is a little different. There I've pretty much settled on finding a set of 3 words that covers all vowels (and Y) and 9 of the most common consonants. Yes, in Quordle you're compelled to use a standard opening. Regardless of what you learn from early guesses, no followup can be more informative than just query…

There are lots of words like this and it affects Wordle too. Take SHA_E. You have SHAME, SHARE, SHAVE, SHALE, SHAKE and SHAPE. It's highly likely your earlier guesses haven't eliminated all of these. So what you have to do is recognize this situation and throw in a word with all of the possible missing letters to tell you which one is the right one. Obviously you need 2 guesses left at least for this to work.

But I've found the same applied with Quordle. Recently I had _LARE and even that allows FLARE, GLARE and BLARE. It turns out solving another word (BRINE) eliminated one of the options for free.

I've noticed whoever chooses the word of the day for Worlde likes these types of words. Like I've ended up with S_ILL before leaving SPILL, SKILL, STILL and SHILL.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#117

Post by thaumasiotes »

jmyeet wrote: post #116
thaumasiotes wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also toy around with Quordle where you have 9 guesses to find 4 words. That one's harder and the strategy is a little different. There I've pretty much settled on finding a set of 3 words that covers all vowels (and Y) and 9 of the most common consonants. Yes, in Quordle you're compelled to use a standard opening. Regardless of what you learn from early guesses, no followup can be more informative than just query…

There are lots of words like this and it affects Wordle too. Take SHA_E. You have SHAME, SHARE, SHAVE, SHALE, SHAKE and SHAPE. It's highly likely your earlier guesses haven't eliminated all of these. So what you have to do is recognize this situation and throw in a word with all of the possible missing letters to tell you which one is the right one. Obviously you need 2 guesses left at least for this to work. But I'v…

> So what you have to do is recognize this situation and throw in a word with all of the possible missing letters to tell you which one is the right one. Obviously you need 2 guesses left at least for this to work.

This advice applies much better to Wordle than it does to Quordle, though. Quordle gives you nine guesses. Four of them are already taken by the need to provide four answers. Three or four go to your fixed opener. That leaves you either one or two discretionary guesses. If your opener ended up giving you trouble with more than one word, you're basically hosed.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#118

Post by vikingerik »

jmyeet wrote: post #108

I used to start with ADIEU because it contains 4 vowels and the most common ones at that. But I've since moved on from that because I found I would be forced to reuse vowels in words 3 or 4. I'm vaguely tempted to take the dictionary and figure out an optimal strategy that 1) guarantees success and 2) minimizes the number of guesses. If you assume every word is equally possible (it isn't; they're manually chosen) the…

I've tried going both ways with vowels (lots or sparingly), and I found it seems to work better to conserve them. Vowels are where you can maximize information by inference rather than by spending your limited slots, by downplaying or ruling out more vowels once you've got what are likely enough.

I always go 5 new letters for the second guess and usually for the third. Knowing more letters are in or out is a lot more information than finding out the same letter isn't in a second position. Particularly for Quordle, you really want more letters through three or even four guesses.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#119

Post by prawn »

jmyeet wrote: post #108

I used to start with ADIEU because it contains 4 vowels and the most common ones at that. But I've since moved on from that because I found I would be forced to reuse vowels in words 3 or 4. I'm vaguely tempted to take the dictionary and figure out an optimal strategy that 1) guarantees success and 2) minimizes the number of guesses. If you assume every word is equally possible (it isn't; they're manually chosen) the…

I play a bit of practice Quordle with a best streak of 97. I start TREAD and SONIC*, then usually HULKY or sometimes BULKY, LYMPH or PLUMB. Whether I use HULKY third usually depends on the prevalence of Ts or Cs. If I'm confident of a word after the first 1-2 lines, I'll obviously go with that as it's a free hit in uncovering more letters or position clues for the other words.

My 9yo loves Quordle also but usually starts TREAD and MINOS.

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