Why I Cheat at Wordle: A Working Definition of Cheating - Part I

How We Got Here

In the first few installments of this series, we've talked about memory (and how most of what we think of as expertise boils down to the ability to commit and recall lists) and about games (and how the structure of a game—its rules and context—are integral to what makes it great).

Beginning with this piece and for the next few following it, we'll be narrowing in on a specific kind of game—which we'll call "games of strategy"—in which the the play primarily takes place in the participants' minds. What these games have in common is that the ability to commit and recall lists and to compute probabilities from them is a key differentiating capability or skill.

You may not think of Wordle this way today, but although it appears to be a word game, the fact that Wordle is based on words is almost incidental to its play: in its essence, Wordle has less in common with Boggle, Pictionary, or Scrabble (which are mostly about words) and more with poker and blackjack, which are mostly about odds. So before we get to Wordle, we'll talk about card games that are more obvious members of this category and that more of us are more comfortable thinking about as games of strategy.

Of course, in a way we've been talking about "cards" from the beginning, when I started the series with an anecdote about a man I knew a long time ago who used a memory technique based on a primitive kind of zellelkasten to improve his fundraising success.

At the end, I asked, "Did he cheat?"

Our goal in this two-part post is to formulate a working definition of "cheating" that will allow us to answer this question definitively—or at least, if not, to understand why it is a more difficult question to answer than it at first appears.

Well, Of Course He Didn't… Right?

Almost everyone who hears this story answers "no," but we want to understand this answer a little better.

It will help to start with a "straw man" definition of cheating. For this, I'll make the implicit assumption that cheating is best understood as a violation of trust, and that behaviors can violate trust across the five basic categories of compliance, fairness, honesty, ethics, and integrity.

• Compliance: Cheating as a violation of the rules of the competition or assessment.
• Fairness :Cheating as an unearned or undue advantage of one party over other parties.
• Honesty: Cheating as a behavior that is concealed, duplicitous or deceptive.
• Ethics: Cheating as a behavior that violates fundamental human values or the principles of non-maleficence.
• Integrity: Cheating as an action that undermines the integrity of the contest, the institution sponsoring it, or the assessment as a whole.

For most cases, this straw man passes our sniff test. Insider trading is definitively cheating because of compliance, fairness, honesty, and integrity. Deflating a football below its regulation air pressure is at least probably cheating because of compliance, fairness, and honesty. Our definition, moreover, is consistent with the good rule of thumb that if you feel the need to do it in secret, or if you would think twice before telling either your grandmother or the opposing team that you did it, it is probably cheating.

It is a fair working definition, but it is not a perfect one. For example, this definition of cheating doesn't answer whether "cheating" exists as an absolute, or whether there has to be a competition or an assessment for the concept of "cheating" to apply at all.

This is important to our exploration because many people might say that no, my friend the fundraiser in our opening story could not have been "cheating" because there was no competition. This is a fair objection, except the same people might also have no problem casually saying that a person sneaking into their kitchen in the middle of the night to devour a tub of ice cream was "cheating" on their diet.

Is this just a colloquial misuse of the word "cheating," or is a person "cheating" any time they fail to adhere to any set of rules they have adopted for any reason at all?

Spaced Repetition

Sometimes, it helps to step away from a loaded question and see how our understanding applies to a similar but less contentious situation.

I recently started to help a friend learn a new language. He naturally gravitated to using flashcards to help build his vocabulary, and these worked, to an extent, but as the weeks went by I noticed that he wasn't making as much progress learning the longer and more structurally complex words as he was at making the shorter and simpler words a more comfortable part of his vocabulary.

I suggested that he try equalizing his proficiency at both ends of the spectrum by modifying his flash card training with spaced repetition.

Spaced repetition is a study technique that uses flashcards—or, for many, their electronic equivalent—while focusing more time on facts or concepts that are harder to assimilate or easier to forget. It takes less time and discipline than mastering the memory palace, but is nonetheless highly effective not only for learning words or phrases in a foreign language, but also for memorizing the names of historical figures, the stages of cellular division, the relationships between mathematical concepts, or even the probabilities of winning a given poker hand.

Like with any set of facts, some will come naturally, and some will be harder to "stick" or easier to "unglue." The idea of spaced repetition is that the better you know something, the less frequently you need to review it, and the more challenging something is for you, the more time you should spend on it.

Just like with memory palaces, there is a system: you review your material just like with a deck of flashcards, except that instead of using a single deck in which you review every concept with the same frequency, you use multiple decks that are each reviewed at a different frequency, with cards moving between decks based on how well you have mastered the information on them.

There's Just One Problem

So let's say that I am learning something new. I've created a set of flashcards to help me memorize key topics and definitions, and I have decided to use spaced repetition to improve my precision and recall. For the most part, I practice as you would expect, but if a definition is "right at the tip of my tongue," I briefly flip the card over, and if that is enough to remind me of the answer, I count it as a success.

Every day for a month, I tally my score in a spreadsheet as a composite of the number of cards in the different decks. The spreadsheet, hopefully, shows my increasing mastery of this material as fewer concepts remain problematic and more concepts are categorized for only occasional review.

I am, justifiably, very proud not only of my increasing mastery of the material but just as much as over my proficiency with the technique itself. There's just one problem: briefly flipping the card over to jog my memory is obviously a violation of the rules.

But is it "cheating"?

And, if so, when does it become "cheating"?

• The moment I do it?
• The moment I do it, but it doesn't matter until I share my spreadsheet with someone else?
• Not at the moment I do it, but at the moment I share my spreadsheet with someone else?
• Neither at the moment I do it nor at the moment I share it, but only when I compare those results with someone else who is not practicing "spaced repetition" in this way?

These questions would be easy to answer if the context were owning a bike that would place it below the minimum weight limit for road racing bikes: you are allowed to own a road bike of whatever weight you wish out of material you wish and it does not become cheating until you enter it into a UCI-sanctioned race. But what about building a lightweight road bike out of a highly hydrophilic composite that is designed to absorb water water from the air as it is ridden, so that it weighs in at the end of a race at 6.8kg, but has gained a full kilogram of "water weight" over the course of riding? Such a bike would give its rider an unfair advantage at the start of the race, allowing them to outpace rivals with bikes of legal weight, possibly securing an early and insurmountable lead. You would probably argue that owning, or building, such a bike shows intent, but is still not actually cheating until the day of the race itself.

Does the same principle apply to me as I peek at the back of my flash cards? Am I cheating? Or am I not "cheating" until I compare my scores, in some way, to someone else? Does cheating only exist once a result is measured, or is cheating a "thought crime" that exists on its own, outside the spectrum of both effect and intent, that we are willing to prosecute regardless of outcome?

Remember your answer to this question: it will become important very soon. Seal it in an envelope and don't look at it again until it is time. And if you are binge-reading this, whatever you do, don't look ahead.

Because that, of course, would be cheating.