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Comment by dejawu | Hacker News Reader

We can do a lot better than random on our first guess, though. Playing the game as a human, I found that it helped to eliminate (or confirm the presence of) vowels and common consonants ASAP. A quick search for five-letter words with three distinct vowels (can't get more than that without straying beyond common English) and the most common consonants (R, S, T) yields words like "autos", "raise", and "suite", which I've anecdotally found to make for great starting words.

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I almost feel like packing the first word with vowels isn't even particularly helpful. I've kept with the same two starting words -- slate and round -- and it has been very easy to guess by the third turn every day. In fact, the only day it took more (5) is when I strayed from using round as the second word. If nothing from those two words hits, the remaining letters leave only very obvious words using I and/or Y.

There really aren't that many 5-letter words, so there's going to be a few specific combinations of two starting words that rapidly whittle the list.

You might enjoy the extra challenge of hard mode (access it through the gear icon), where every guess you make has to be a potential solution based on the existing history.

Something it doesn't stop is reusing eliminated letters, which adds a little more to it. You can do that yourself though.

I wrote a script to calculate the expected information gain for any possible guess. It has several caveats - it probably doesn't share exactly the same word list as the game, it assumes that all valid words are equally likely, etc. But apparently TARES is the most informative first guess in expectation. RATES is also very close, and feels a bit more plausible as possible answer.

XYLYL is the worst.

I generally start with TEARS, INDOL and CHUMP, which seemed to match the 15 most common letters in the right order in the word list I had available at the time.

Part of what makes it fun is that a random guess can be a lot stronger against a puzzle than the common word guess.

ADIEU seems to be a popular four vowel choice. Seems to work pretty well in practice.

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