Do You Durdle at Workle with Wordle?

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krimhorn

krimhorn

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  • #1
    So, yeah, I'm no good at this game even if I can eventually get there but I'll go ahead and start a thread lest we call upon us the Wrath of pauli (much scarier than Khan's wrath) for littering up the Random thread with game-specific talk.

    I've played 3 days so far. Day 1 I cheated heavily and got it in 4. Day 2 was 5 and Day 3 was 6.

    Strategies? Thoughts? Do you just forget what words are when playing word games like me?
     
    Mister E. Meat

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  • #2
    I'll paste my post from the random thoughts thread:

    My strategy has been to use words that have RSTNLE as the first word since as we all know from Wheel of Fortune, those are the most common letters in words in English. Then for word 2 I generally try other common letters like APC. I'll also say to not be afraid to "waste" a round by not using an out of place letter in your next word. Sometimes getting the new letters will help you more than knowing where an "E" goes.

    Since it's a dedicated thread, here's a word that I like for word 1: STERN. Hits a lot of the most common letters in English words. Then I'll use a word like CLAIM for word 2 unless I get a bunch of hits on word 1. This should give you a large number of the most common letters.

    So far I've gotten 3-turn wins twice, 4-turn wins twice, 5-turn wins twice and one 6-turn win. I did cheat the first time I played by looking at a word list with the letters I had and had left since I wasted a bunch of turns using the same letters over and over.
     
    krimhorn

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  • #6
    pholus said:
    I use a similar strategy and I play with the restriction that any revealed hints have to be used in subsequent guesses. My stats so far:
    Click to expand...
    The funny thing is, I didn't have that on but with only 6 guesses it doesn't make much sense to not play that way in the first place. I guess if you're good enough at guessing broadly to get 3-5 correct letters across 2-3 words with different it might make it easier but I find it much easier to begin narrowing down the possibility space of the positions for the known "correct" letters.
     
    Arasirsul

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  • #7
    Mister E. Meat said:
    My strategy has been to use words that have RSTNLE as the first word since as we all know from Wheel of Fortune, those are the most common letters in words in English.
    ...
    Since it's a dedicated thread, here's a word that I like for word 1: STERN
    Click to expand...

    Pat Sajak has steered you wrong: The most common letters in English dictionaries (we're looking for a word, so commonness in text doesn't help us as much here, though that's what you usually see-- but even in texts, vowels come higher than most of those consonants) is E S A I R N T O L C-- Wheel of Fortune treats vowels separately from consonants, so you're probably losing a lot of vowel hits playing by their rules. "raise" may be a better starting point.

    This is assuming that Wordle picks its words at random and not paying attention to letter distribution in dictionaries itself.

    pholus said:
    I use a similar strategy and I play with the restriction that any revealed hints have to be used in subsequent guesses.
    Click to expand...

    I've resisted turning that on because I'm the sort of person who, with the evidence a mere two lines above, will space out on the fact that "Oh, right, I knew that", and having the software enforce me remembering that I knew that seems more like easy mode than hard.
     
    Mister E. Meat

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  • #9
    Arasirsul said:
    Pat Sajak has steered you wrong: The most common letters in English dictionaries (we're looking for a word, so commonness in text doesn't help us as much here, though that's what you usually see-- but even in texts, vowels come higher than most of those consonants) is E S A I R N T O L C-- Wheel of Fortune treats vowels separately from consonants, so you're probably losing a lot of vowel hits playing by their rules. "raise" may be a better starting point.
    Click to expand...
    Great point. I'm sure you could even go further by figuring out 5 letter word letter frequency. Here's an updated analysis using Google's N-gram viewer API.

    ETAOIN SRHLDCU
    Click to expand...

    So likely the best word would be something like STAIN for word 1 and CHORE for word 2. The C in Chore is probably too highly placed but I don't know if HOLER is in the Wordle dictionary. It is in MW "main" dictionary but not in their Scrabble dictionary.

    Edit: maybe ANTED followed by ROILS is better to hit most of the top letters in two words.
     
    Ardax

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  • #10
    My strategy so far has been to use Adieu just to blitz through most of the vowels. But I'm starting to realize that it's not the best method.
    Click to expand...
    Why not? I used ALONE to start today. I can't think of any 5-letter consonant only words off the top of my head, and getting vowels is important for starting to nail down possible consonant-vowel sounds (graphemes? phonemes?) that are likely to be in a word.

    If you can eliminate a number of high-hit consonants on the between the first and second guesses, you really reduce the search space for words with guesses 3+.
     
    Frennzy

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  • #12
    I got damned lucky on this one in 6. I was blanking hard, and then on number five took a wild stab. I had three in the correct spot, and two wrongs. On Guess 5 I got lucky with the first letter, out of place, so I knew where IT went, and from there I just eliminated any possible letter that I had already used. Only one possible word remained.
     
    Jonathon

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  • #13
    I've used RATES as my starting word the last few days; it checks five very common letters (and the two most common vowels), and checks for a trailing S specifically (in case a plural shows up-- has that ever happened?).

    But I failed on 207 (had 3/5 greens after guess #5, but that left a few different possible words given my remaining letters and I guessed wrong), so maybe don't do what I do. :p

    Where I stand on stats so far (done 10, failed on 2):

    z7bJWJAm.png
     
    Artichoke Sap

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  • #15
    Huh. I hadn't thought about doing 2 guesses up front of 10 unique letters no matter what. I guess I also enforce (by choice) the use of yellow letters. I also prefer picking a new word to start every time, in the hope that I can get lucky.

    Very curious if the backend is utterly random every day, or is in any way reacting to the community trends of guesses, some kind of Wordle metagame.
     
    rtrefz

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  • #17
    I started 3 days ago, with my strategy bet described as "flailing around" I did solve all 3 words though, and I am getting better (6/5/4 guesses).

    My issue is that my brain locks on similar words, even if I know it won't work. For example (spoilering because it may provide hints for today)

    Let's say my first guess is steer . Both Es are grey and r is green. The problem is my mind keeps thinking of words that end in "er" even though it's obviously not the right answer.
     
    Defenestrar

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  • #21
    rtrefz said:
    I started 3 days ago, with my strategy bet described as "flailing around" I did solve all 3 words though, and I am getting better (6/5/4 guesses).

    My issue is that my brain locks on similar words, even if I know it won't work. For example (spoilering because it may provide hints for today)

    Let's say my first guess is steer . Both Es are grey and r is green. The problem is my mind keeps thinking of words that end in "er" even though it's obviously not the right answer.
    Click to expand...
    Walk away and come back once your brain has had a chance to relax. It's not like there's a giant time crunch before the next word goes live.
     
    Frennzy

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  • #22
    Jonathon said:
    Ardax said:
    Wait, a letter can show up more than once in a solve? D:
    Click to expand...
    Yes. Actually happens fairly often, as a matter of fact.
    Click to expand...

    You'll know it if it makes sense to re-use it in a word. (i.e. green or brown, even though you might already have a green or brown one) At least that's the way I recall it.
     
    Jonathon

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  • #23
    Frennzy said:
    Jonathon said:
    Ardax said:
    Wait, a letter can show up more than once in a solve? D:
    Click to expand...
    Yes. Actually happens fairly often, as a matter of fact.
    Click to expand...

    You'll know it if it makes sense to re-use it in a word. (i.e. green or brown, even though you might already have a green or brown one) At least that's the way I recall it.
    Click to expand...
    Yeah; if you repeat a letter, it'll only highlight it twice (green or yellow) if it appears twice in the word. If it's only in the word once, you get one highlight (in the correct position if green, or the first instance if yellow).

    But that requires you to actually make guesses that use a letter twice. A typical strategy probably tends to avoid using letters more than once to maximize the amount of information you get per guess, which makes repeats tricky to spot.
     
    VirtualWolf

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  • #26
    Today's took me a bit of thinking. I haven't actually turned the switch on in Settings but I've been playing in hard mode anyway (revealed hints need to be used in subsequent guesses) and find that much more of a brain-challenge.

    Wordle 208 4/6

    🟩⬜⬜⬜🟨
    🟩⬜🟨⬜⬜
    🟩⬜⬜🟩⬜
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    I've only been playing for like five days so far, but my go-to starting word is "ARISE" which seems to work pretty well.
     
    cmannes

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  • #28
    So, someone decided to poke around the code of Wordle. And I've unfortunately misplaced the link to the article about it.

    But he discovered the 'dictionary' for the app is self contained within the app. And he reversed the logic that picks the word. And he then built out a jsfiddle that will tell you tomorrows word, today.

    https://jsfiddle.net/rreichel3/eq703rtL/

    Don't run it, if you don't want to spoil it. :)

    EDIT: Found the link to the blog outlining how it works. https://reichel.dev/blog/reverse-engine ... ordle.html
     
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