Best Wordle guessing strategy
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Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy
#2I did some work on this as well.
One thing I think this analysis seems to be missing is taking into account letter position within the word set. If you take that into account, it actually shifts the first guesses, since you're far better off to discover a green square than a yellow one.
There are some pretty weird words that pop up if you do this analysis, so I've settled on some that are slightly suboptimal but won't make me feel like a robot every day.
I will say that "cares", in my analysis, is a significantly better option than the author's suggestion of aeros, because "e" is more common in position 4 than in 2, and a is much more common in position 2 than 1.
Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy
#3Fight your wordle bot at https://botfights.io/game/wordle
Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy
#4A friend wrote up a post a couple of weeks ago about solving Wordle with python:
https://poetix.medium.com/playing-wordle-with-python-6750185...
I note that a very recent Wordle game used the same letter twice, rudely negating one of his otherwise quite reasonable assumptions there.
Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy
#5Or maximize entropy:
https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1480337678281363461
Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy
#6Over 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 with which each of its letters appears in the wordlist multiplied by the frequency that the letter appears in that specific spot. When looking at the entire list of words the top five choices are:
1. tares 2. lares 3. cares 4. pares 5. dares
However, if you just look at the words that could be answers (which I what I've decided to do), the list changes to:
1. soare 2. saine 3. slane 4. saice 5. slate
In either case I've never had a puzzle where repeatedly choosing the first suggested word didn't get me to the answer in six or fewer guesses.
Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy
#7It's interesting to think about optimal starting words, as some people might be more prone to thinking in terms of phonemes ("th", "ed", "sl") rather than individual letters. For this and other reasons, I imagine cognitive scientists would also be interested in the Wordle play data, as they can look to see which hypothesis testing strategies people people use over the course of game.
Also, one version of Wordle people can play is to pick the best starting word every time, another involves starting with a different word every time.
Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy
#8Over 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…
The American spelling of favor got me yesterday. I'd never think of it as a possibility for a 5 letter word. That word list is pretty handy for knowing which words are in scope
Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy
#9Or maximize entropy: https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1480337678281363461
Ah, helpful to see people analyzing for hard mode. I don't have that enabled, but I try to force myself to play that way.
Re: Best Wordle guessing strategy
#10I 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.