> Q: What simple strategy guarantees a win within 6 guesses?
I've seen a lot of analyses of Wordle that pose this question, and I feel like these are not people who play Wordle (not unlikely - these are seemingly people more interested in analysing the game from a statistical standpoint than simply playing directly).
But while the answer to this question is interesting enough, it's not that interesting. People I've spoken to who play have zero interest in winning in 5 or 6 guesses - in fact most would consider a score of 6/6 a loss (or at least a relatively bad score), unless it was a particularly tricky word.
> (1) If I win in two guesses, am I good or lucky?
Q: What first guess maximizes the number of guaranteed wins on the second guess?
Q: What first guess maximizes the number of expected wins on the second guess?
> The probability of winning in two guesses is about 2%, so the answer is: mostly lucky.
These - and the follow-ups I was hoping for for 3, 4 & 5 guesses respectively - are much more interesting questions.
* Yes I can just clone this and edit to find these things out (& probably will later this week) but I'm just commenting on my confusion around why there's so much focus on the least interesting part of a problem.
I know how to simulate the game and get a very good strategy (or see what others have done), but I use different starting word every day because it makes it more interesting.
I'm using the same strategy and I have to say it mostly is doable. I was afraid for vivid (two repeated letters) but if I remember correctly the next day was quite doable starting from vivid.
> I've seen a lot of analyses of Wordle that pose this question, and I feel like these are not people who play Wordle
Interesting thought. But idunno, I am prettty into wordle, I agree with you, my goal with the daily is to get it in 3 as often as possible, but when it comes to "extracurriculars" I'm interested in all sorts of questions that are divorced with this concern. And I'm actually not that interested in deeply analyzing the part I enjoy most (getting the daily in 3).
> I'm actually not that interested in deeply analyzing the part I enjoy most (getting the daily in 3).
I think I'm similar; I've been using the same starter word since almost day 1, and despite having seen lots of very compelling evidence that it is suboptimal, I have not changed it :D
But I'm still somehow interested in what is optimal (& I guess oddly passionate about the definition of optimality).
Actually yeah, even though I'm trying to get it in 3 every day, I do not optimize my starting word. In fact I get quite some pleasure out of choosing a bad starting word (like MELEE) and then going for a 3. I wouldn't mind if wordle had an option to start with a random word (and everyone who plays that way that day has that same randomized starting word.)
That is a genius idea. Maybe the first row of coloured squares that you share can be a different colour scheme to show to others that you are playing that mode.
This is why I switched off of hard mode, after trying it a few times. For me while it was technically harder, it lost some strategic depth and the games became a lot less interesting.
It's in an important sense actually easier! Sure, good play results in more guesses than in not-hard-mode, but that would be like saying a 100m sprint is easier than a 2-mile race because the latter takes longer. The more interesting measure of difficulty is how hard it is play optimally. And since the search space for not-hard-mode is bigger, I'm pretty sure it's harder.
But more importantly, hard mode is also less fun, and this thread demonstrates exactly why: the creative aspect is coming up with le mot juste for quickly honing in on the right answer. Hard mode takes away your tools to do that and sometimes even results in a thoughtless guessing game.
I kinda like when "hard mode" makes you have to come up with a possible word even if it seems impossible to think of one, which can be a satisfying puzzle, not having the restriction makes it easy to think "okay screw it, I'm going to spend a guess to search for letters".
It only forces you to reuse greens. I like to play in hard hard mode in my head, where each guess must be consistent with everything previous. Still not actually hard though, obviously.
wordle tends to be more familiar words, so I'd ignore blate and blake. So now we have D, M, R, S, Z
Doesn't look like there's a word that has 4 of these letters to guarantee on next guess. So need to try for the most likely 3 letters. Could be 2 more guesses, but still ends up better than a 1 in 5 chance.
> Spending another guess to reduce that search space is the right move (assuming you're not playing hard mode).
This, again, depends what your goal is, or what you consider "winning". If you're only focused on avoiding losing, then yes this is the right move. If you're trying for a low score, it's not as clear, and hard mode may actually be "easier" in many ways.
No it absolutely is the way to win in the fewest moves. When you have more than 2 equally possible words then the next word should be a choice that reduces the search space rather than going for a guess.
It's the way to win in the fewest words on average.
If you want to maximize your number of three-guess-wins even if your 6-guess-failure rate is higher, it is obviously can't be a correct strategy to use your third guess on a word that you know can't be correct.
Sure, my point is that the metric "minimize mean number of guesses to win" isn't axiomatically the objective function: the 6 threshold already suggests that many people would rather have a "guaranteed 6 and average 5" rather than "average 4 but fail 5% percent of the time".
If someone considers a 4 to be a soft-failure then they will prefer (3,6,6) to (4,4,4) even though the latter is a lower mean number of guesses: it's a higher count of 4+ 'failures'. The strategy that considers (3,6,6) a better result than (4,4,4) wouldn't guess "dream" in the above example.
I find it fun because it prompts me to find the optimal guess (given hard mode). Playing easy mode I'm much more happy to do the first word that comes to mind and sort of fits.
Very anecdotal and personal, and non-technical, but I believe wordle words are usually very simple ones, so in your case, BLAME will stand a better chance than the remaining three. BLADE could be second.
'blade', 'blame', 'blare', and 'blaze' are all words that will be used in a wordle puzzle one day, and all equally likely to be used since it uses all words once.
The OP does link to this blogpost[0] which, while frustratingly also focuses heavily on the "worst-case" & seems to treat "winning" as "avoiding the worst-case", it does also have some numbers on decision-trees that produce highest average scores: those are linked here[1] & are much more interesting.
Reading that wiki page brings up a follow-up question:
Given:
- the optimal starter word appears to be the quite obtuse word "SALET"
- while we don't know that "SALET" won't someday be an answer, there's a common assumption among players that the answer list consists of "common" words. If I'm not mistaken this is a founded assumption
What would the rankings of the subset of optimal starter words that are "common" be (i.e. would be likely to be reasonable guesses of typical players)?
It's interesting to see the averages from different decision trees and that the optimal hard mode is only 3.51 -- and that easy/hard mode are so close. It makes me wonder how much of my stats are pure luck. I'm currently sitting at exactly 3.5 after 48 hard modes (0/2/26/14/6/0) starting with SLATE, but while I feel pretty confident playing the game, I definitely have not used the "optimal strategy" every time, if I even knew that strategy in the first place.
Given how close hard mode and easy mode are, and that even when calculating averages, 4, 5 & 6 are still considered "wins", I strongly suspect changing the parameters could show hard mode to be "easier" for a "<4 or bust" goal.
> I definitely have not used the "optimal strategy" every time, if I even knew that strategy in the first place.
It's also worth noting that these models (presumably) assume an equal chance for every word in the provided dictionary, whereas - assuming the answers are "common" words - a human will likely be strongly biased toward the subset of possible answers and therefore can have much higher probabilities of success in practice than the theoretically-optimal strategies.
Was phrasing the statement from the perspective of a model "player", but I guess knowing whether "SALET" is in the answer list is not quite the same as knowing where each word is in the list, so you could semi-cheat and use the answer list as your definition of "common", without gaining too much knowledge.
> The probability of winning in two guesses is about 2%, so the answer is: mostly lucky
That's for any given game, so presumably if your statistics over time are significantly higher than 2% then the answer is mostly good? Or perhaps that's a statistical fallacy akin to tossing a head 5 times in a row?
My dictionary, excluding proper names and words with punctuation, has about 4600 five-letter words. I'd add a question to your list related to how the 2315 Wordle words were chosen as an analysis of this might provide more heuristics for how to win faster.
> Q: What simple strategy guarantees a win within 6 guesses?
I've seen a lot of analyses of Wordle that pose this question, and I feel like these are not people who play Wordle (not unlikely - these are seemingly people more interested in analysing the game from a statistical standpoint than simply playing directly).
But while the answer to this question is interesting enough, it's not that interesting. People I've spoken to who play have zero interest in winning in 5 or 6 guesses - in fact most would consider a score of 6/6 a loss (or at least a relatively bad score), unless it was a particularly tricky word.
> (1) If I win in two guesses, am I good or lucky?
Q: What first guess maximizes the number of guaranteed wins on the second guess?
Q: What first guess maximizes the number of expected wins on the second guess?
> The probability of winning in two guesses is about 2%, so the answer is: mostly lucky.
These - and the follow-ups I was hoping for for 3, 4 & 5 guesses respectively - are much more interesting questions.
* Yes I can just clone this and edit to find these things out (& probably will later this week) but I'm just commenting on my confusion around why there's so much focus on the least interesting part of a problem.