Greatest game of the year, Wordle! I am a beginner so I got stuck quick and created
Wordle Solver
to figure out the Wordle. I can solve Wordle in 4 tries by first trying SLATE and then
PRIMO and then narrow down the Wordle word from those two. The holy grail of figuring out
Wordle in 3 tries constantly is very hard. Millions of users share strategies on
Twitter and other social media.
Wordle has only 2500 words currently. So choose obvious words that you know as that
is probably the answer. Say the word choices are TEAKS and SKATE. The answer is
probably SKATE. Now we are writing AI software to help figure out the best way to win
wordle. With a mixture of statistics and math we see the human mind vs the computer.
The computer has a database of words but the human mind can think abstract so don't
count the human out. Luck always has a say in the matter but you can't count on luck
every time and we want consistency.
The Artifical Intelligence, AI, is programmed by running a routing thousands or millions
of times and examines and learns the fastest process to guessing the Wordle.
The way a tree has many branches is how the AI runs many branches testing each one out.
After running the AI millions of times the AI will tell you the best word to play.
Then if you keep it running it can tell you the next best word to play based on the
green, yellow and gray letters. I constantly solved the Wordle in four tries
doing this. I was a bit disappointed the AI did not guess the Wordle in three tries.
I will keep looking at the algorithm to tweak it and see if I can make it better.
Linguistics
I stopped the AI as soon as I saw a book on linguistics experts which is a person who studies
language and its structure, morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics.
So how do linguistics battle Wordle. First lets look at the frequency of letters
in the 2500 Wordle words.
The chart shows the distribution of letters in the full list of Wordle eligible words
that 'E' is the most common letter. Remember this is just for Wordle words.
E is the fifth letter in over 17.5% of Wordle words. E also appears in the fifth position in over 10% of eligible five-letter words.
First thing to notice is how often the letter is used in each position from one to five.
The letter E used 11% of the time as the first letter and 18% as the fifth letter.
Now if you look at my AI program you see why CRANE is the top pick as E is the last
letter. Once you get the green, yellow and gray letters back from Wordle then figuring
out the best second word is even harder. Which letters appear the most with other letters?
If you see R as the second letter do you try a P or T as they often go with R?
What I notice and laugh at is that S and Y are the fifth letter 15% of the time.
'S' is used more of course in the other positions. So many times you can rule Y
out as it won't fit as the last letter and odds are its not in the word.
Also if you see the second and third letter are unknown then A is used here 13%
of the time. So you see how the AI is programmed to guess words but the human mind
can think abstract and an advantage over computers.
So do you focus on on vowels or consonants? Right now linguistics are attacking common
letters to rule out words. Yes that chart shows alot of good information and you can
solve the Wordle in 4 guesses 99% of the time.
Some letters become more important as the game goes on. Depending on the position
of the letter. But humans might try common letters that give the human mind different
and better information on the possible Wordle.
I can see R, E, A, S, B, G, N, O, T, U, are most used in this order.
The letters I, Y, K, L, M, C, Q, are less used and H and Z not used at all.
You can use this information to form a strategy. Some people like to use
less common letters to target where the more used letters probably are.
Some people believe vowels are the Way to go in Wordle. Words like
SOARE, RAISE, ROATE, EQUAL or 4 vowel words like OUIJA, AUREI, OURIE, ADIEU and
LOUIE.
Or go for common consonants like S, R, N as in STERN or BARNS. But you can
use less common consonants as well if you have a big vocabulary and know
your linguistics. This enables you to narrow down the words if you hit some letters
with these uncommon consonants.
The worst mistake you can make is repeating a letter in the first two guesses.
You lose the chance to gain a lot of information that you already know. I feel
it is much better to use the chart and find letters that appear together often
and that were not used in the first guess. Ironically this is the strategy most
beginners use.
