Wordle Is a Love Story(nytimes.com) |
Wordle Is a Love Story(nytimes.com) |
- Simple
- One puzzle a day, and everyone plays the same one so you can share and compare scores
- No account creation, logins, ads, subscriptions, data mining
All the right ingredients for going viral. I just hope the last point stays unchanged.
> Fun fact: this concept is also the basis for a game show on Dutch national TV. I took part two years ago, and spent way too much time optimising our strategy: https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29713212
And we even went up to ten letters! (Albeit in a slightly different format.)
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.
Love it.
dayOffset = floor((today - 19 April 2021) / 864e5)
index = dayOffset % wordList.length
wordOfTheDay = wordList[index]
edit: It's literally just picking the next item in the array in sequence.
Looking forward to tomorrow.
[0]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motus_(jeu_t%C3%A9l%C3%A9vis%C...
Show HN: Wordlet - a Wordle Bookmarklet to add change day button (just in case you miss some days :P)
...
So I just took a look now. Are you talking about the huge list of ~12,974 words embedded right in the code?
https://web.archive.org/web/20220105234455/https://www.power...
Allows for continuous play
Repo here https://github.com/sigvef/fiveletters.xyz (not mine)
That's how I confirmed that the solutions are in order, in the JavaScript.
Same daily word, same dictionary of words, same code.
wordle.berknation.com
here is one I found today, you can have multiple tries, and chose word length
wonder what other innovations occur before we round back into scrabble
Another clone
Log base 2 of the remaining words is a measure of how many yes/no questions it would take to identify the word. An entropy strategy looks for a clue word that minimizes the expected value of this measure. One optimizes sum p log p over the pile sizes.
Pure mathematicians prefer certain concepts with a religious fervor. Often this has been informed by a reasonable number of problems where a concept has been proven optimal. The best applied mathematicians understand pure math but prefer practical work. To a pure mathematician, the rest are just guessing.
Here, one needs a clearly stated objective function for measuring success. Entropy strategies are often optimal for simple objective functions.
A critical detail for this game: The secret words come from a shorter list than the valid guess words. One wants a guess word that best partitions the shorter list of secret word candidates, not the full list of valid guess words.
I did some research and (from what I found) the most common letters in English are:
E, O, T, A, I, R, N, H, S (not in any order)
So I came up with TRAIN and SHOVE as 2 starting words that use all those letters without repeats, plus V.
WORLD is also a good one because it uses one of the most common starting letters (W, T, A, O, D) and one of the most common ending letters (E, D, S, T).
Some other good starting words for me have been RIVET, CANDY, PLUCK and BASTE.
The article says they whittled it down from 12,000 words to around 2,500 words, aiming for words that most(?) people would be familiar with.
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.
Correction: a month ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29439191
AROSE UNTIL DUCHY BLIMP GAWKS
Though when I google that phrase, Silver uses the modern spelling.
As for the luck, sure, there's some of that. But you have plenty of guesses to get to the word if you play according to letter frequency, and always maximize the information you'll get out of a guess. Think of it like counting cards. The goal is to shift the odds as much in your favor as possible. Most games are like that. Deterministic, perfect-information games are a just a small subset of games.
Put another way:
People who say "it's just luck" either don't know, or don't care - but it's neither a correct, nor a clever position.
The aspect I don’t love is that in forcing dictionary words to be attempted, people can rely on that at the end rather than winning through word knowledge. My 9yo plays it and generally does well but was bailed out once by this.
Notoriety and "number go up" is enough incentive sometimes.
I made sure not to look at the words after today's as I don't want to cheat.
Wordle 202 3/6
00000
0?0??
11111thanks
There is a point about luck taking away from the longevity of the game. Unless the developer adds more game dimensions (in the same minimal, non-intrusive way) I kinda think most people will stop playing in a few months
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.
This is mostly useful for optimal play against an opponent (which is not the case here). Imagine an adversarial version where the opponent doesn't have to commit to a word at the beginning but must reveal one matching all clues if you can't get it in 6 guesses (basically, they can change their word when you guess and you are trying to make that impossible).
They have two lists of words: one is a list of possible answers, and another is a list of extra (valid) words which can be guessed (in addition to the words in the answer list). Sometimes it might be better to use a non-answer word as a guess: the best case gets worse (since you cannot win immediately) but the average case and worst case both get better.
SOARE 3.45
RAISE 3.46
ARISE 3.47
SERAI 3.52
The assumption you need to make for my analysis to be correct is that the letter patterns in the 2,500 possible answers is statistically similar to the distribution of letter patterns in the original 12,000. There are probably some differences between the distributions, and I'd love to rerun my code with the actual word list Wordle uses, but in the absence of that list, I think that my code does about as good as possible.
[1] uses for the answers; I assume it allows all 12,000 for guesses. [2] NYTimes does not specify which source they used