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Best Wordle guessing strategy

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Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#131

Post by thurn »

ghusbands wrote: post #117
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.

Well, the author is already looking at the larger Wordle wordlist, probably using an english dictionary would be more in the 'not cheating' spirit.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#132

Post by albert_e »

peeters wrote: post #67
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.

It's too bad hard mode only requires that you use positive clues, not negative. I've been trying to push "true hard mode" with my work colleagues. Where every guess must be a potential winner given the information revealed thus far. So, hard mode, plus no reusing grey letters, plus no using yellow letters in the same incorrect slot.

this is my default approach unless really out of options i can think of

but i do slip up at times and jump to punch in a word that i later realize violates one of those yellow rules for instance

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#133

Post by less_less »

ghusbands wrote: post #117
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.

If you're writing a program to solve Wordle, you're already cheating in some sense.

Whether or not you use the target word list, it's important to recognize that there *are* two separate lists: you can guess almost any plausible 5-letter word, even bullshit Scrabble words like SOARE. But the target word will always be a relatively common word, because the game is designed to be winnable for ordinary English speakers. Honestly the word list is still a little harder than I would have picked for a broad audience; eg REBUS the other day was on the obscure side.

It's also worth noting that the target word will never be a 3- or 4-letter word pluralized by adding -ES or -S. This is something that you could notice simply by playing for a couple weeks. These seem to have been excluded manually or by a regex: it does have plural words of other forms, and it has words with other endings like -ER or -ING.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#134

Post by less_less »

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…

I agree with your criticism. It's also not clear what "optimal" means, since there are multiple desirable metrics: fewest average guesses, fewest worst-case guesses, etc.

Full brute force is allllmost computationally feasible, at least for some metrics. Like you could probably exhaust the search space in a month on a small cluster, at least if you're minimizing either (worst case, average case) or (pr(lose), pr(take 6 guesses), pr(take 5 guesses) ...). It's also significantly easier to brute-force in hard mode.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#135

Post by taejo »

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…

> 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.

With some restrictions it's possible to do a full minimax. In that case, you still don't know if it's optimal, but you've at least got an upper bound. And it turns out, it's possible to guarantee victory while finishing in an expected 3.554 guesses. Alternatively, you can finish in an expected 3.212 guesses if you don't mind a small chance of taking more than six guesses.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#136

Post by bee_rider »

strstr wrote: post #104
bee_rider wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which word list did you use?

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

The game has two lists -- the guessable words list, and there's also a subset which is the possible answers list (this is also provided to the players, I think maybe in order, even -- it is just for fun after all, no need to prevent cheating). IMO it is better to stick to the guessable words list.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#138

Post by Syzygies »

strstr wrote: post #104
bee_rider wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which word list did you use?

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

They made a mistake. There are 2,315 relatively familiar words that can be the secret word, and 12,972 words in all that are accepted as guesses.

Using the full list as potential guess words, TARES is optimal for a random secret word from the full list, and SOARE is optimal for a random secret word from the short list.

Neither of these words appear in the short list. If one sticks to the short list for both guesses and secrets, RAISE is optimal.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#139

Post by Syzygies »

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…

> wasting part of an hour as I did searching for a clever way to score guess words.

I'd love to see scoring a Wordle guess added to one of those programming problem sites, as code golf in any language would be amusing. I was once a commercial APL programmer, so APL comes to mind.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#140

Post by duderific »

reificator wrote: post #22
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.

Go to the gear in the top right, and enable `Hard Mode - Any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses`.

I was playing hard mode accidentally. I didn't realize there was a more optimal way to play.
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