If you want a challenge, try https://lirdle.com/
One letter per line is a lie.
Solving Wordle using information theory
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: Solving Wordle using information theory
#42I think most people understand such problems are analytically tractable, but not everyone understands that the challenge and pleasure of a game is being able to do so unaided.
Re: Solving Wordle using information theory
#43I thought this was old news? I remember people making videos about using information theory to solve Wordle back when it was particularly hyped. (After writing this I checked, there's even a 3 blue 1 brown video on this) My favourite along those lines was solving wordle in 1 guess using the distribution of coloured squares on social media https://www.kaggle.com/code/benhamner/wordle-1-6
It's not clear how the strategy in the article differs from the one used by Wordle Bot, the analysis/feedback system that Wordle links to on the victory screen at the end of the game: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-bot.h... The first page of the published paper ( https://orb.binghamton.edu/nejcs/vol8/iss1/6/ ) also claims that the game was developed by "Josh Wordle", so maybe it just isn't the…
> also claims that the game was developed by "Josh Wordle",
To be fair, that is a 1 letter typo; the developer is in fact "Josh Wardle".
Re: Solving Wordle using information theory
#44I crushed wordle within a few days of its popularity entering my sphere. It was pretty easy to brute-force a decision tree minimizing the average number of guesses using a lowly python script and a few days of qpu time. Don't Wordle[1] is significantly more interesting; I've got a solver but the maximum score takes my lowly python script upwards of a day (per day) to solve using brute force. For now, I solve it with…
I "crushed it" when it came out with Right click -> View source -> Find the list of words. All the future words were in the code already.
This is why I explicitly mentioned that in my puzzle ethics. I reject that as a valid solve.
(And amusingly I said "qpu time" when I meant CPU)
Re: Solving Wordle using information theory
#45I crushed wordle within a few days of its popularity entering my sphere. It was pretty easy to brute-force a decision tree minimizing the average number of guesses using a lowly python script and a few days of qpu time. Don't Wordle[1] is significantly more interesting; I've got a solver but the maximum score takes my lowly python script upwards of a day (per day) to solve using brute force. For now, I solve it with…
what's qpu?
Re: Solving Wordle using information theory
#46I crushed wordle within a few days of its popularity entering my sphere. It was pretty easy to brute-force a decision tree minimizing the average number of guesses using a lowly python script and a few days of qpu time. Don't Wordle[1] is significantly more interesting; I've got a solver but the maximum score takes my lowly python script upwards of a day (per day) to solve using brute force. For now, I solve it with…
Another great variant is Unfair Wordle [1]. The opponent does not fix the answer upfront but instead evades the player's guesses as long as possible, providing you with the least information it legally can give (according to the usual rules) while still preserving a valid game completion path. The result is that your guesses end up looking extremely unlucky in retrospect. [1] https://tweakimp.github.io/unfairwordle/
see also "absurdle": https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html
Re: Solving Wordle using information theory
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the 100 Wordles is just "Solve one Wordle" in a for-loop. If you're an even somewhat decent engineer, it takes under 10 minutes to get it working (inefficiently). Then we encourage people to do whatever they want next: improve their average score, build a frontend UI for it, solve on Hard Mode, etc. In the past, we never did technical interview questions like this. We always asked people to bring their own proj…
Next week on HN: Solving Multiple Parallel Wordle with SIMD
"Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes... For Wordle!"
(Yes, I'm referencing a real thing, and it's worth watching.)
Re: Solving Wordle using information theory
#48To paraphrase von Neumann, isn't that how everyone does it?
Yeah, exactly. My girlfriend did it too, using information theory. In my solution, I did chose a word that minimized the size of the larger set of possible guesses. It's not strictly information theory, but it's a good approximation of finding 'the word that brings the most information [this turn]'.
I suspect that this researchers work involves formalizing and proving the optimality of their solution.
Re: Solving Wordle using information theory
#49I made a Wordle solver in Clojure a while back which is backed by an English word frequency database. My family believes it is cheating to use it. Much more fun to write that code than to play the game though :D
Re: Solving Wordle using information theory
#50Didn't like 20 different YouTube channels do this exact thing back when Wordle was relevant?