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Wordle Is a Love Story

nytimes.com

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Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#81

Post by Ichthypresbyter »

lostinquebec wrote: post #37
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.

STEAR - not technically a word, but it is accepted, and hits the most common vowels and consonants.

I think it's an archaic spelling of the verb "steer". I remember the edition of Treasure Island I had as a boy has Long John Silver use it in the line "We can stear a course, but who's to set one?" when they are discussing whether to mutiny.

Though when I google that phrase, Silver uses the modern spelling.

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#82

Post by mmastrac »

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 start with ADIEU, personally.

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#84

Post by lapetitejort »

rockostrich wrote: post #48
kevinmgranger wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've already found a clone that lets me play as many words as desired with as many characters. The only downside is that I've burnt myself out two days after discovering Wordle.

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#85

Post by lapetitejort »

evan_ wrote: post #33
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 use "RENTS" which puts the S at the end as a quick test for plurals.

I've been using that as well, just one letter off of the classic R S T L N E

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#87

Post by supernova87a »

Syzygies wrote: post #83
supernova87a wrote: post #29

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

Reset your clock to tomorrow's date, and play again. That's how I confirmed that the solutions are in order, in the JavaScript.

Hah, how amusing. Client side self metering

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#88

Post by jasone »

I've been playing this as a road trip game since a friend introduced me to it in high school. Depending on the age of the people playing (and/or the fraction of concentration the driver needs to devote to driving) we also play with 3- or 4-letter words. 6 is a bit much for me to keep track of in my head.

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#89

Post by noxvilleza »

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 did some analysis on this last week [https://noxville.medium.com/raising-the-wordle-first-guess-b...], ROATE left the lowest average valid answers (60.424) but 195 in the worst case. RAISE was the second best average (61.0) but a much better worst case of 168 words. Both are just heuristics, there might be a better word than either if the game were solved.

Re: Wordle Is a Love Story

#90

Post by noxvilleza »

iams wrote: post #23
lalaithion wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I coded some heuristics and ran them on a Scrabble dictionary: https://github.com/lalaithion/wordle

With the first word you aren't necessarily trying to get the most number of matches. You are trying to use the word that once you get the match result back, it discards the most number of words. These two are not the same thing.

> You are trying to use the word that once you get the match result back, it discards the most number of words.

This isn't strictly true either. Two N-sized subsets of words from a common initial set might have completely different difficulty in reducing further, because in the worst case there might not be a valid guess which nicely spreads the remaining words out among the 243 possible outcomes for that guess.

Set-size is a good heuristic, but it's just that - a heuristic.

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