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Reverse engineering Wordle

reichel.dev

31–40 of 67 posts

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#31

I figured that was possible; from the UX it was pretty clear it’s all client side. What I would find cool is derivation of the best strategy at any time. Just like blackjack, there should be a “best” move at all times , and it would be cool to measure yourself against that

I made one, not the optimal strategy though, I simply minimized the expected number of possible solutions for the next step. I repurposed my Mastermind solver since it's basically the same game. Just like Mastermind, minimax is probably better than what I did, but it does solve every Wordle in at most 5 guesses, on average 3.4 guesses. https://github.com/jbchouinard/untitled-word-game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma…

I think using the expected logarithm of the number of solutions (entropy) makes more sense from an information theory perspective. I wonder if it works better in practice.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#32
Fun times. I remember back in the year 2000, during the dot com craze, there was a company in India that built a clone of "Who wants to be a millionaire". It was in beta and there was no real cash or prize involved.

They had all the answers stored in the source code. I wrote up a quick perl script to play the game and unfortunately left it running overnight, and in the morning there were complaints from other players asking how I'd reached the top rank so quickly.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#33
post #18
post #7

> It seems like many of the variables are given names that are not descriptive at all to make it a bit more difficult to read. The code is just minimized for prod.. The article as written makes it sound like the developer(s) intentionally wrote their code cryptically, whereas minimization for deployment is fairly standard practice

How common is it to have your minifier change symbol/variable names to short ones?

It's actually pretty standard

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#34
post #30
post #29

> var Ha = new Date(2021,5,19,0,0,0,0); > My assumption is that this is the launch date for Wordle But not 19th of May 2021, but 20th of June 2021 Every time I look as JavaScript, I find a new reason to hate it.

Only 50%; the month is zero-indexed, but the day isn't.

So 19th of June 2021.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#35
This is an unusual thing to find myself typing in a HN thread, but this could use a spoiler tag, as I did not expect to have tomorrow’s challenge ruined for me by a technical blog post.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#36

This website is crashing Chrome on my Xiaomi :/

Came here just to post this too - My Motorola is now stuck in an endless loop of chrome crashes because it keeps trying to reload this blog and gets stuck every time, even trying to navigate away crashes chrome. Robert - next time you attack the source of a website, make sure the source of your own website runs properly first.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#37
post #26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How common is it to have your minifier change symbol/variable names to short ones?

That's literally what they are for.

For some context, it didn't used to be terribly common. There's a fair amount of minifying that you can do without touching symbol names, though obviously it doesn't help as much as shortening them. The old jsmin cited about 50% reduction, and it didn't touch any variable or class names.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#38
post #35

This is an unusual thing to find myself typing in a HN thread, but this could use a spoiler tag, as I did not expect to have tomorrow’s challenge ruined for me by a technical blog post.

I'm not easily finding the publication date, but for me the article says tomorrow's word is "query", which was actually the word a couple days ago. If that's what you see, too, then I think it's safe.

Re: Reverse engineering Wordle

#40

This was good while my wife and I were in the same time zone: we compared guesses and how we got there. Now that she's a day ahead, we can't do that right now (we found this out when she accidentally did a spoiler).

One thing I do while playing with people half a world away is to send just the final pattern (Share button copies that to the clipboard). Once both parties have sent their answers, you can share the screenshots :-)
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