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My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

i-kh.net

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Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#41
I thought it was in that linked video or somewhere that I found a list of starting words to try to make it easier to solve it based on letter frequency and getting a few vowels in within the scope of the Wordle word list (not a dictionary list).

These are the words I use:

SOARE

TREAD (or TRADE, which is an anagram)

ADIEU

By default my game play is like “hard mode” (only use letters already found to be correct and avoid letters found to be incorrect). That helps most of the time.

One of the annoying (or challenging) things about Wordle is that its word list has many sets of words that differ by just one letter. For example, you may get _ATCH right and then have to really guess if it’s going to be CATCH or BATCH or PATCH or MATCH or WATCH or LATCH or HATCH (maybe there are more words with a different first letter in this range). I’ve seen several sets of words like this. Just can’t do this within six total guesses. So chance does matter.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#42

Originally I used BLACK, WHITE, SOUND, and tried to guess from there, occasionally throwing in GRUMP if the word wasn't obvious. I didn't like the repeated vowel, and knowing if there was a Y in the word would help, so I switched to: AMUCK FETID SWORN GLYPH 100% so far. One or two of those may have involved aggressively grepping /usr/share/dict/words, though.

[deleted]

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#43
post #41

I thought it was in that linked video or somewhere that I found a list of starting words to try to make it easier to solve it based on letter frequency and getting a few vowels in within the scope of the Wordle word list (not a dictionary list). These are the words I use: SOARE TREAD (or TRADE, which is an anagram) ADIEU By default my game play is like “hard mode” (only use letters already found to be correct and avo…

I thought this too at first, but this is where the real strategy comes out, because you can guess MULCH and that will tell you if it's LATCH or MATCH. or CLIMB, that would also eliminate BATCH. There's intelligent ways to guess to eliminate more letters. Hard mode is only hard because it eliminates this possibility of constraint narrowing.

I think Hard Mode is not a good name for it. The game is already plenty hard.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#45
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that cheating? The dictionary is part of the game.

The subset of words that are solutions is an internal data structure of the game. It is clearly cheating to refer to that list. If you are willing to examine the inside of the game's black box, the optimal strategy is to simply extract today's answer.

As a human, you already have knowledge which is similar to knowing the internal dictionary: you can judge what other kinds of words Wordle is likely to avoid (uncommon words, proper nouns, plurals). So I don't think it is cheating.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#46
post #9

REACT PIOUS Hits all the vowels except Y. But I feel like it's not so great. Wish I could replace the P with something more useful.

ADIEU STROY All the vowels and the three most common consonants in two words.

Do you mean STORY, not STROY?

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#47
post #35

There are 28 letters. With 3 initial same words you can cover up to 53.5% of the alphabet. With 4 initial same words you can cover up to 71.4%. There are only 5 vowels A, E, I, O and U which can be covered with the first two words. You can even add Y in the first two words played.

Wordle only uses 26 of those letters.

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#48
post #4

Just use a random word, luck will do the rest.

For the variants I've programmed, I've enforced that they start with a random word guessed (same random word for everyone though.) Wordle is good as it is but personally I think most of the variants would be better off adopting this feature. That said I saw someone speedrunning 10x Xordle games and for speedrunning they just ignore the starting word and make the same 4 guesses every time: CARVE SHIFT GODLY WHUMP

Was that fireb0rn? I remember him doing a speed run on hollowkight where every 30s or so, he'd have to solve a wordle

Re: My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time

#50
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that cheating? The dictionary is part of the game.

The subset of words that are solutions is an internal data structure of the game. It is clearly cheating to refer to that list. If you are willing to examine the inside of the game's black box, the optimal strategy is to simply extract today's answer.

Thing is, you can develop a very strong intuition for which words are in that list: they're all common words and mostly "main dictionary entries" (you probably won't find a 4 letter noun or verb with "s" tacked onto the end, probably not "ed" or "es" either)

Certainly using the exact list is a step beyond that; but you can in fact get very accurate at guessing which words might be on it without memorizing the list

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