Josh Wardle is a cultural icon. He's really done an amazing thing.
Troll stopped play: IRATE TROLL SPORT SHORT
Alas poor Yorick: STARE SPOIL SKULL
New virtual law firm: IRATE CLOUD LEGAL
Reacting to The Slap: IRATE SHOUT PUNCH SNOUT
that way, we can actually measure how we're doing against each other so it's a more fun competition.
PORTS (or FORTY if ADIEU doesn't match anything)
I just want all the vowels.
LIMED
YOURS
and I almost always get it on the fourth guess, sometimes in three guesses
ROUST
gets all the vowels plus some very common consonants
STARE BLIND CHUMP
Might
Plows
—-
95% success rate.
For me, the best part of Wordle is not in finding the answer but in the steps prior as I work out the path to solving the correct answer.
Putting the same words in at the start got boring after the third game, and the first word dictates the on-the-fly logic to select the next, and so on.
It all comes down to how you want to play. Using maths optimises "winning", but not using maths challenges ones situational intellect. I prefer the latter.
It is unfortunate that 3Blue1Brown's excellent video has been so often misquoted as providing "optimal" guesses for Wordle. Of course, one can legitimately argue that using maths takes the fun out of the game... but if we *are* going to use maths, then the information entropy approach is simply not the one most suited to this specific game (because the dictionary is fully known).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30094398
[2] https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle-optimal/#fixed-guesses
[3] https://github.com/alexandres/magicwordschallenge
[4] https://github.com/alexandres/magicwordschallenge/issues/2
I'm vaguely tempted to take the dictionary and figure out an optimal strategy that 1) guarantees success and 2) minimizes the number of guesses. If you assume every word is equally possible (it isn't; they're manually chosen) there would be an optimal starting word. I'm sure others have looked into this but this is something I'd like to do myself.
After that it branches depending on what hits you get on that first word. It may be possible that a second fixed word (or a small set of second words easily memorized) would be near-optimal but not actually optimal. I'd be curious to know this too.
But I'm curious how good an optimal strategy would be vs some of the naive strategies we've all chosen.
It's also an interesting question as to when it's worth switching from finding what letters are in the word vs locking down their position. If you get COAST and AT are in the word but in the wrong position, should your next attempt be 5 new letters or a word containing AT in different positions? The disadvantage of this of course is you're only testing 3 new letters.
I also toy around with Quordle where you have 9 guesses to find 4 words. That one's harder and the strategy is a little different. There I've pretty much settled on finding a set of 3 words that covers all vowels (and Y) and 9 of the most common consonants.
Bonus: If you and your friends play hard mode, you can try to do a reverse wordle on their solutions.
My histogram is mostly 4's, with 2 losses in around 100 games, so I think I'm doing something right.
> In hard mode, Wordle can be solved in 3.5076 guesses on average (with 6 guesses at worst, i.e. 100% of the time). Or, with a different decision tree, it can be solved with a slightly worse average, but always within 5 guesses
I’ve played 113 times on hard mode and only lost once so far, guessing between two possibilities on the sixth word.
For a while now I’ve just been starting with the previous day’s word to mix things up, rather than trying to use the most optimal starters.
salet, cramp
Pulis
Chynd
This does more than half of the alphabet for the most frequently used letters.
Those are the 10 most common letters in 5-letter words. Even if I get good hits with SNAIL, I enter ROUTE.
For octordle/sedecordle I found that the 2 standard guesses wasn't enough to stop getting stuck, particularly it's missing Y for words that use that as a vowel. For those puzzles, I use INPUT SHAME GLORY, but I've not attempted to check if this is anything like optimal - I very rarely fail those puzzles with these 3 tho.
Imagine having SHA?E confirmed and now being forced to stupidly guess between SHAPE, SHAKE, SHARE, SHAME, SHAVE or SHADE instead of eliminating half of those possibilities with a single word.
So maybe this implementation of a hard mode isn't well suited anyway if you're looking for a bigger challenge in skill.
Based on that, coupled with a little bit of insight on English words (as opposed to random collections of 5 letters) I've ended up with ALIEN, STORM, CHUMP as my regular first 3. Sometimes I deviate if the earlier rows offer insight, and sometimes I swap the first 2 based on a whim.
And unless it is obviously worth a try, I use my first 3 words to eliminate letters and not to guess.
I usually get it in 4, sometimes in 5, almost never needing 6, and have failed once. So not necessarily the best, but good enough.
If an E exists but not in the second spot then it is THMYE to learn more.
Wordle is good as it is but personally I think most of the variants would be better off adopting this feature.
That said I saw someone speedrunning 10x Xordle games and for speedrunning they just ignore the starting word and make the same 4 guesses every time: CARVE SHIFT GODLY WHUMP
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-bot.h...
These are the words I use:
SOARE
TREAD (or TRADE, which is an anagram)
ADIEU
By default my game play is like “hard mode” (only use letters already found to be correct and avoid letters found to be incorrect). That helps most of the time.
One of the annoying (or challenging) things about Wordle is that its word list has many sets of words that differ by just one letter. For example, you may get _ATCH right and then have to really guess if it’s going to be CATCH or BATCH or PATCH or MATCH or WATCH or LATCH or HATCH (maybe there are more words with a different first letter in this range). I’ve seen several sets of words like this. Just can’t do this within six total guesses. So chance does matter.
I think Hard Mode is not a good name for it. The game is already plenty hard.
On to the next game!
thank
fuels
crowd
gimpy
On Octordle, 4 words seem easiest although it makes the game more of an anagram solving exercise and in my limited experience didn't give me much of a consistent score advantage vs. three.
(That stat comes from one of the multi-play Wordle imitations which does in fact track success rates.)
I don't recall mean attempts, though I believe it's still between 3-4 tries.
Once most characters are tested, it's usually pretty clear what the actual word is, and some familiarity with the actual wordlist (which I picked up merely by playing the game, not by examining source), the harder cases also become pretty obvious.
Doubled letters and anagrams are the most difficult cases.
No idea if it'll become unplayable eventually but I'm having fun seeing it play out as more and more common words get locked out
AMUCK FETID SWORN GLYPH
100% so far. One or two of those may have involved aggressively grepping /usr/share/dict/words, though.
I have a go-to third guess when needed, I just can't think of it right now.
I have a similar strategy, I always start with
Blame Horny Cupid
The sequence has the upside of containing every vowel, without repeating a single character. Downside is it does not contain some pretty common consonants, I'm gonna have to try some of the sequences suggested in the post to compare what seems better now
But I don't think it is a good idea for the average person to have too many set words. Unless you have great knowledge of the dictionary of legal words you might need extra clues to word order etc. ie I recently got a game with a letter repeated 3 times.
I like AUDIO and PIOUS as vowel removers depending on what's already in and out. FRUIT has also served me well.
PIOUS
Hits all the vowels except Y. But I feel like it's not so great. Wish I could replace the P with something more useful.
I think it's bad strategy, but might help meet your goals, because D is pretty good.
STROY
All the vowels and the three most common consonants in two words.
PIOUS
I also want to hit all vowels ASAP, and I'm also dissatisfied with that P.
I used could a lot until it became one of my o my 2-guess wins. Now I hate using it knowing there is zero chance it’s the answer. I still do occasionally if someone after 3 guesses all 5 of those letters are available, which is almost never.
I always go 5 new letters for the second guess and usually for the third. Knowing more letters are in or out is a lot more information than finding out the same letter isn't in a second position. Particularly for Quordle, you really want more letters through three or even four guesses.
Yes, in Quordle you're compelled to use a standard opening. Regardless of what you learn from early guesses, no followup can be more informative than just querying more letters.
It's kind of disappointing to me how much luck is involved in Quordle. I've just established that the only common letters in a word are S, A, and Y, with A second and Y fifth. All three other words are already guessed. Do I guess SASSY or SAVVY? The game gives the appearance of being much more skill-based than it actually is.
But I've found the same applied with Quordle. Recently I had _LARE and even that allows FLARE, GLARE and BLARE. It turns out solving another word (BRINE) eliminated one of the options for free.
I've noticed whoever chooses the word of the day for Worlde likes these types of words. Like I've ended up with S_ILL before leaving SPILL, SKILL, STILL and SHILL.
My 9yo loves Quordle also but usually starts TREAD and MINOS.
I've programmed 3; the way that went down is I was curious if an idea I had would be fun (two Wordles on the same board, sort of a mix between Wordle and a word jumble since you don't know which word the clues go to.) Since there was an open source implementation this only took me one night, and it was in fact fun and started gaining some traction as https://xordle.xyz
Then some game designer friends suggested their own takes and I implemented those too: https://fibble.xyz lies to you once per row, and https://warmle.org tells you if you're close to the right letter rather than if a letter is in the wrong spot which gives the gameplay a very different feel
Josh Wardle said on a podcast[1] that him and his partner chose the set of words by taking all 5 letter words in the dictionary and filtering out the "bogus" ones. He then randomized the order of these words so that him and his partner could play. However, I'm not sure if the New York Times has changed how word selection works.
[1] https://syntax.fm/show/430/creator-of-wordle-josh-wardle
This advice applies much better to Wordle than it does to Quordle, though. Quordle gives you nine guesses. Four of them are already taken by the need to provide four answers. Three or four go to your fixed opener. That leaves you either one or two discretionary guesses. If your opener ended up giving you trouble with more than one word, you're basically hosed.
The last two were unlikely to be the word, but I try to finish in only a few minutes and those popped to my head before foyer. But I could have guessed BOXER or DOPER or some other words I’m sure. When I’ve lost it’s usually because I have 3 letters and guessing only 2 new letters at a time doesn’t let you eliminate the other options fast enough.
Our wordle slack group lots of people lost on foyer.
I had started with some random word with lots of consonants (all black result), so when I got to having just o e and r, I only had two clear possibilities I could see left with three guesses.
There are two reasons that you always win within 6 guesses:
1. It has been shown [1] that in hard mode you can always solve wordle in 6 guesses (but not always in 5) if you assume that the hidden word is "reasonable", i.e., taken from the 2k-word list. However, if you know 12k 5-letter English words and if you don't assume that the hidden word is "reasonable", then you will sometimes need 7 guesses.
2. Even then, the average number of guesses that you need is much lower, at 3.5 guesses (or 4.5 using all 12k words). So if you play optimally or close to it, it is only in very rare cases (the worst case) that you will need the full 6 or 7 guesses.
So, surprisingly, the game is easier if you are not a "savant", or to be more precise, if you are not a computer :-).
[1] http://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best_...
[1] http://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best_...
[0] 4*5 assuming that 1 letter is one bit of entropy, which is a rule of thumb when you're compressing gigabytes of text to log2(26^(4*5)) if we just count the combinations of letters
Certainly using the exact list is a step beyond that; but you can in fact get very accurate at guessing which words might be on it without memorizing the list