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Best Wordle guessing strategy

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Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#31

Post by azinman2 »

WhiteOwlEd wrote: post #30

I feel the best strategy to win at Wordle would be to see if someone already posted the answer. If no answer, use reliable hints ( i.e on Twitter) to better inform the initial guess. Beyond that, the best initial word goes beyond information theory, letter frequency, etc to also be a word that has a realistic chance of being word of the day. As a trivial example, AEIOU may reveal some information on the first guess,…

If you’re looking up the answer, then you’re cheating. What’s the point? You can already get it via JavaScript if you’re so inclined.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#33

Post by jonathankoren »

I made my own Wordle solver recently that uses frequency analysis of letters and bigrams of five letter English words as a scoring function. It works fairly well.

Someone in this discussion suggested using frequency analysis at position, which seems interesting, especially when trying to locate misplaced letters. I might have to try that.

https://github.com/jonathankoren/wordle-solver

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#34

Post by LimitedInfo »

biesnecker wrote: post #6

Over the weekend I wrote a tool to help me figure this out: https://github.com/biesnecker/wordlesmith Wordle's wordlist is interesting. There is a large (~10,000 words) list of words that it will accept as guesses but that will never be the answer, and a much smaller (~2500 words) list of words it will both accept and could be the answer. My tool's simple algorithm scores words by taking the product of the frequency…

Happy to see tares as your top choice. I used the same method and came to the same word.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#35

Post by Supermancho »

jonathankoren wrote: post #33

I made my own Wordle solver recently that uses frequency analysis of letters and bigrams of five letter English words as a scoring function. It works fairly well. Someone in this discussion suggested using frequency analysis at position, which seems interesting, especially when trying to locate misplaced letters. I might have to try that. https://github.com/jonathankoren/wordle-solver

What was your source for "English words"? This is an interesting problem, itself.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#36

Post by sg47 »

My first two words are POINT and SHEAR though I'm going to change it to SNARE. This covers most of the vowels and frequently occurring letters. From then on it's trying to guess the other consonants and the position of the letters.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#38

Post by ricardobeat »

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 search space, I’m sure someone can do the math on this being more beneficial.

Yesterday I got one green one yellow in the first guess, and got the word in three steps from there. There are very few words that could fit after those two letters + all the excluded ones. You literally just iterate through the alphabet and possible words in your head while excluding the gray letters.

EDIT: just did today in 4 guesses again using this approach. Lucky streak?

My starting word is BACON.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#39

Post by jonathankoren »

vple wrote: post #13

I also wrote a tool for playing: https://github.com/vple/wordle-solver/blob/main/solver.js There's probably more tuning I can do for the algo, but roughly: - I took all the words from the site's js as the dictionary. - From remaining eligible words, compute the letter distribution (ignoring letters you already know are in the solution). - Pick a word that uses as many of the most frequent letters as possible. - Use o…

This is pretty much what I did, but I mixed in a regexp to hold the location restrictions, and a penalty for using the same letter multiple times. (eg guessing “added” is worse than “aspen” for “a..e.”)

I do wonder if looking at how a letter splits the space of letters and words would be interesting

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