Wordle For Me, Please

I don't know if this is such a big deal in the rest of the world, but for the last few weeks my Twitter feed from mostly Argentinian/Uruguayan/Paraguayan/Chilean accounts was inundated by people proudly posting their Wordle results.

Finally, I decided to have a look at what all the fuss was about, and found out that it was just a refurbished "Mastermind" that used letters and words instead of colors.

Immediately, my mind started to design an algorithm that would maximize the probability of finding the solution with the minimum number of tries.

And just like that, my latest "weekend project" was born.

Since "Wordle" only allows to play once a day, first I needed to find an alternative to test the algorithm during development. This app was the winner:

The algorithm worked very well, always finding the solution at an average of ~4 attempts.

One of the main problems is that there is no way to know which words are considered "valid" by "Wordle", so I used this list of 100K most common English words for my dictionary.

Notwithstanding, "Wordle: No Wait Wordle 24/7" sometimes rejects the first word that my algorithm proposes in its ranking. In those cases I just keep inputting the next one on the list until it accepts one.

(BTW, the word was actually "TOPIC", discovered in the 3rd, try)

Finally, a couple of interesting results:

The best starting word could be "SORES", "CASES", "COMES", "THREE", depending on how Wordle selects the target words.

(I prefer "COMES", it seems to strike a good balance.)

Since the algorithm is independent of the length of the target word, it could predict the best starting word for any length. Here's the resulting list:

• so
• man
• more
• comes
• series
• parties
• families
• centuries
• concerning
• interesting
• conversation
• determination
• representation
• representations
• unenforceability
• disinterestedness
• telecommunications
• straightforwardness

I think I serendipitously discovered a new kind of Poetry...

"...families, centuries concerning, interesting conversation..."

#wordle #algorithm #poetry #weekend #project