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Wordle Is a Love Story

nytimes.com

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Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#41

Post by willis936 »

slg wrote: post #8

I tried this game the last couple of days and I don't get the appeal. There is some skill involved, but there is also a huge amount of luck. For example yesterday I had "ti_er". I guessed "timer" but the actual word was "tiger". That left me with a score of 5 instead of 4. Does that say anything about my skill level as a player? Honestly, this seems to mostly be a marketing success story about the sharing score funct…

If one must judge performance in this game, then they shouldn't put much weight into the final score. That's why the share game button shows your progression. It tells a story that other players can understand. I learned to guess without using known correct letters by seeing games shared by friends. I know counting theory, I know Bayes, but it still wasn't a strategy I came up with on my own. The game is just something fun to do at a time where that is in short supply.

Put another way:

https://imgur.com/a/AkPPuYH

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#42

Post by lalaithion »

iams wrote: post #26
lalaithion wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ARISE is good, but AROSE is better, and SOARE is the best: On average it eliminates all but 2264 out of ~12000 5 letter words. https://github.com/lalaithion/wordle

It depends on your word list, are you using the same word list as wordle?

I do not. According to the original article, Wordle uses[1] 2,500 common words out of the 12,000 5-letter words in the english language[2]. I use the 5 letter words in the collins scrabble dictionary (which is about 12,000 words).

The assumption you need to make for my analysis to be correct is that the letter patterns in the 2,500 possible answers is statistically similar to the distribution of letter patterns in the original 12,000. There are probably some differences between the distributions, and I'd love to rerun my code with the actual word list Wordle uses, but in the absence of that list, I think that my code does about as good as possible.

[1] uses for the answers; I assume it allows all 12,000 for guesses. [2] NYTimes does not specify which source they used

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#44

Post by detritus »

ajayvk wrote: post #15
vishnugupta wrote: post #5

This is an easier version of Bulls & Cows [1] game I played in college during boring classes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulls_and_Cows

I built a version of Bulls and Cows at https://cowbull.co/ , mainly for my kids to play. One difference in Wordle is that when there is a match, Wordle shows which letters matched. In Bulls and Cows, it just tells the number of letters which matched, which makes it a bit more difficult in some ways.

Thanks for this - it looks it'll be ideal for feeding the craving after my partner and mine's daily Wordle!

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#45

Post by prawn »

slg wrote: post #8

I tried this game the last couple of days and I don't get the appeal. There is some skill involved, but there is also a huge amount of luck. For example yesterday I had "ti_er". I guessed "timer" but the actual word was "tiger". That left me with a score of 5 instead of 4. Does that say anything about my skill level as a player? Honestly, this seems to mostly be a marketing success story about the sharing score funct…

I went TIMER, TILER, TIGER and scraped in. I had been getting most in 3-4 attempts prior to that.

The aspect I don’t love is that in forcing dictionary words to be attempted, people can rely on that at the end rather than winning through word knowledge. My 9yo plays it and generally does well but was bailed out once by this.

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#46

Post by bspammer »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #32
dotsam wrote: post #18

Tip: don’t look at the source if you don’t want to see the answers (I thought the words might be obfuscated but they’re not)

I was wondering about this but I haven't looked yet. ... So I just took a look now. Are you talking about the huge list of ~12,974 words embedded right in the code?

There are two massive lists, one is the wordlist and one is the actual answers in date order.

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#47

Post by beepy »

supernova87a wrote: post #29

I wish I could play a few more games at once and not be metered 1 per day.

If you happen to be on an Apple device, may I humbly suggest you look up "Three Magic Words" on the app store. It's a different take on the same root game, sometimes called "Jotto" or "Ghost."

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#48

Post by rockostrich »

kevinmgranger wrote: post #30
paxys wrote: post #16

- Fun - Simple - One puzzle a day, and everyone plays the same one so you can share and compare scores - No account creation, logins, ads, subscriptions, data mining All the right ingredients for going viral. I just hope the last point stays unchanged.

I hope the third point stays unchanged too. Too many services out there optimize for engagement, the expense being the encouragement of addictive behaviors.

Everything to do with the game is hard coded into the client. I doubt there's any plan to change that. But I wouldn't be surprised if clones popped up that tried to maximize engagement/revenue.

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#50

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

bradleybuda wrote: post #6
wenc wrote: post #4

What’s your optimal 5-letter starting word? Mine is HOUSE. It has 3 vowels (including E which is the most frequent in the English language) and S which helps test for plurals.

I like TRAIL - no "E", but the next two big vowels and TRL are very good consonants

What a coincidence. I played this for the first time today and started with TRIAL.
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