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Best Wordle guessing strategy

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Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#41

Post by nwiswell »

MauranKilom wrote: post #16

It seems clear to me that there is an optimal starting word, but that the best second word has to depend on the info you gain from the first. Case in point: If you get 3 green 2 yellow in the first word, you can solve on the next guess. Of course, you can constrain your strategies to "I always use the same two/three starting words", and in many cases that will be fine. But it's quite obviously not optimal. Also, the…

> It seems clear to me that there is an optimal starting word

I took one step further and calculated the optimal starting word for obtaining green matches (I assume that this also makes it likely to produce yellow matches, although I did not explicitly optimize for that).

Beginning with the full list of 5-letter words, I calculated the frequency of each letter of the alphabet in each of the 5 possible positions for a 5 letter word.

Then I iterated through the list a second time, this time assigning a score for each word equal to the sum of frequencies for each letter in its respective position.

By a significant margin, the highest score is SLATE (over 1400). Runners up (over 1300) are SAUTE, SHIRE, and CRATE.

Caveat: this approach assumes that all possible words are equally likely to be the answer.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#42

Post by jlynn »

Two things I've wanted to explore with Wordle:

1. Some sense of "par". Can you crawl twitter for everyone's solution tweets and get a sense of the average guesses for the day? 2. "Unwordle". For people who follow the hard-mode rules, how far can you get deciphering their guesses based on their shared color grid? Could you make it competitive between friends to see how well you can guess each others guesses? Would that encourage more creative guesses to trick your friends?

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#43

Post by jonathankoren »

Supermancho wrote: post #35
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.

Googling will give you countless lists. The internet solved that problem decades ago.

The biggest problem is when your guessing dictionary contains words that aren’t in the acceptable word list in Wordle. For that, I generate 10 guesses on each turn. At least one of them should show up. I didn’t want to use Wordle’s dictionary because that felt like cheating.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#44

Post by meterplech »

I built a command line wordle solver that provides an updated best guess as the game progresses and you learn more. Right now it's just based on word frequency, but working to add more.

Also added a command line version of wordle in case you want to play more and practice and a simulator I'm using now to explore optimal strategy more.

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

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#47

Post by codefined »

nwiswell wrote: post #41
MauranKilom wrote: post #16

It seems clear to me that there is an optimal starting word, but that the best second word has to depend on the info you gain from the first. Case in point: If you get 3 green 2 yellow in the first word, you can solve on the next guess. Of course, you can constrain your strategies to "I always use the same two/three starting words", and in many cases that will be fine. But it's quite obviously not optimal. Also, the…

> It seems clear to me that there is an optimal starting word I took one step further and calculated the optimal starting word for obtaining green matches (I assume that this also makes it likely to produce yellow matches, although I did not explicitly optimize for that). Beginning with the full list of 5-letter words, I calculated the frequency of each letter of the alphabet in each of the 5 possible positions for a…

Interestingly, doing a similar analysis where we bucketed each word into 243 (3^5) buckets based on the possible result, we found "RAISE" as the best word. Source[0]

[0] https://gist.github.com/popey456963/a654e98d0180566b897b70ee...

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#49

Post by tobinfricke »

Yet another Wordle solver!

https://github.com/nikitaborisov/autowordl

We choose the guess that is expected to result in the smallest set of possible solutions after one guess.

For the secret answer "QUERY" it suggests the following sequence of guesses:

1. LARES

90 possible answers after this guess.

2. GROUT

Only four possibilities now: ['ENURE', 'INURE', 'QUERY', 'QUIRE']

3. BRIBE

This narrows the field down to one possibility:

4. QUERY

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#50

Post by nwiswell »

codefined wrote: post #47
nwiswell wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems clear to me that there is an optimal starting word I took one step further and calculated the optimal starting word for obtaining green matches (I assume that this also makes it likely to produce yellow matches, although I did not explicitly optimize for that). Beginning with the full list of 5-letter words, I calculated the frequency of each letter of the alphabet in each of the 5 possible positions for a…

Interestingly, doing a similar analysis where we bucketed each word into 243 (3^5) buckets based on the possible result, we found "RAISE" as the best word. Source[0] [0] https://gist.github.com/popey456963/a654e98d0180566b897b70ee...

RAISE also sounds pretty plausible.

How is the score calculated? What is the trade-off between expectation greens / expectation yellows?

Intuitively I expect that greens are significantly more "valuable" than yellows, since they reduce the search space much more...

Maybe this is all the wrong approach and the right metric is how many legal answers remain after the first guess?

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