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Best Wordle guessing strategy

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Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#61

Post by Nursie »

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…

Interesting. I've been using ORATE as it knocks out a lot of the top frequency letters from the english language as a whole. But I guess the distribution in five letter words, and more so in a subset of five letter words, may skew differently.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#62

Post by schappim »

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.

I did the same. My source of words was the Unix dictionary found in macOS. The path is:

  /usr/share/dict/words
When I did the frequency analysis, I scoped it to only 5 letter words.

If you're looking for a great "first guess word", "trace" is one of the words that will yield the most clues.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#65

Post by Syzygies » 

    5.291 soare
    5.294 roate
    5.299 raise
    5.311 raile
    5.311 reast
    5.321 slate
    5.342 crate
    5.342 salet
    5.345 irate
    5.346 trace
    5.356 arise
    5.360 orate
    5.370 stare
    5.382 carte
    5.390 raine
    5.400 caret
    5.402 ariel
    5.406 taler
    5.406 carle
    5.407 slane
Shown are the twenty best initial guesses using Claude Shannon's definition of information entropy. Each number is the expected number of yes/no questions needed to resolve the remaining uncertainty. Shannon is the "father of information theory", and this is the right measure.

One might recognize SOARE as identified elsewhere by a different measure. I am relieved that I give up very little by moving down to the first word I recognize on this list.

This takes about 20 minutes to code in Ruby, and four minutes to run. There's no point to using a more efficient language, or wasting part of an hour as I did searching for a clever way to score guess words.

In the 1960's my dad used entropy to program Jotto on Kodak's computers. It wasn't feasible then to evaluate every possible clue word, but he determined that one did well enough with a random subset.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#66

Post by nwiswell »

CSSer wrote: post #59
paulcole wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. There’s a great many 5-letter words that the creator will never consider because they’re too obscure. Treating all 5-letter words as possible is a mistake when calculating strategy for this. High-frequency letters will be over-represented in your analysis…

GP might’ve pulled the wordlist from the site. It’s in the bundle iirc.

Yep, it's the site wordlist.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#67

Post by peeters »

paxys wrote: post #10

I don't like the "exploration" strategy of playing Wordle. Once you have a start word, work onwards from there (aka "hard mode") rather than enter another random guess to narrow down more letters. I know it is a valid strategy, but idk just feels like cheating to me.

It's too bad hard mode only requires that you use positive clues, not negative. I've been trying to push "true hard mode" with my work colleagues. Where every guess must be a potential winner given the information revealed thus far.

So, hard mode, plus no reusing grey letters, plus no using yellow letters in the same incorrect slot.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#69

Post by peeters »

ledauphin wrote: post #11
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…

One of the things noted by the OP is that you can get stuck in a rut if you don't do more info-gathering than just the first word. I would recommend not even trying to guess the word on attempt 2 - much better almost always to guess 5 totally different letters.

Hard mode is so much more fun (which disallows this strategy). It changes it up much more each day and is more challenging.

Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy

#70

Post by elicash »

rckrd wrote: post #46

My contribution to the best-first guess on Wordle is a greedy algorithm that picks the word that eliminates the most solutions. [1] [1] https://matt-rickard.com/wordle-whats-the-best-starting-word...

On easy mode, what should the second word be? Third, fourth? How often can you get the word ENTIRELY by eliminating as many words as possible in this way?
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