Show HN: A Wordle for the command line (Spanish and English) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Wordle for the command line (Spanish and English)

github.com

34 pointsflyingpumba16 comments

Cool! I’d recommend tweaking the dictionary a bit though … here are the first 5 words in the English one:

aahed aalii aargh abaca abaci

I don’t think I would ever think of putting in any of those words, so if that was the solution, I’d just be stuck. (Are they actually real words?)

The list of acceptable wordle words is available. I'm sure someone else has made the effort to make it a little more accessible.

view-source:https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/main.e65ce0a5.js

Apparently, aahed is the past tense of aah. [webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/aahed)

Edit: typo

Neat! One thing that has interested me about this game is whether or not there is an optimal first word. Is there is a word that contains the 5 letters which most commonly appear in the language? Preferably where more of the letters appear at their most common index? If so it seems one should use this word as the first guess each time given we have no other information other than the length of the word.

There's been a lot of research into finding the optimal strategy to beat Wordle; I've avoided reading up on them so far because I enjoy the process of casually figuring it out with my friends, but I think many of them have been posted to this forum.

RSTLNE are the letters people use for the final game in wheel of fortune. I'd assume a word made of those letters would be pretty good.

I use one that involves your eyes, but there are probably others.

Those letters are probably the best if you’re limited to a single vowel, but there are vowels that are more common than some of those letters. As I posted in another comment, I saw someone who wrote a solver say that the optimal starting word is ROATE.

A word with three vowels to start would probably give many tells

Someone who wrote a solver said the optimal starting word is ROATE, since it had a bunch of vowels etc.

I usually keep ETAOIN SHRDLU in mind. ATONE would be a good one. It shouldn't really be too hard to exhaustively calculate an optimal strategy for the complete list of five-letter words; my /usr/share/dict/words has only 6806 of them.

Edit: for all the five-letter words in the above list, the order of frequency is ESAROILTNDUCYMPHBGKFWVZJXQ. Wordle has a different list.

oater, orate, or roate are probably the optimal first selections. Given Wordle's word list, they let you make the largest prunes the list of possible answers.

The order of letters in the guess word may also be relevant, to give you as much information as possible (green is better than yellow; there may be branches in the search tree where twice the same letter in a word is advantageous).

There have been a few attempts to answer this.

One approach is to look at which guess, averaging across all answer words, gets the most hits. You'd expect a word that uses several of the most common letters ETAOIN etc. This helps you quickly discover letters that appear in the answer. Using this strategy, a common first guess is SOARE, explained here:

https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle...

Missed letters provide information as well, though. Instead of optimizing for the most green/yellow hits, you could divide the entire solution space by the 3^5 possible green/yellow/gray patterns generated by the initial guess. Which initial guess divides most evenly, so you can reliably eliminate 99% of the possible answers? That would be ROATE, explained here:

https://medium.com/@tglaiel/the-mathematically-optimal-first...

Note that ROATE and SOARE are very similar to one another. There are 729 T's in the Wordle wordlist and 669 S's, so ROATE seems like the slightly better answer.

(If going by the first strategy, why SOARE and not ROATE if there are more T's? Probably because there are 3x as many words that start with S than R in the list, so it optimizes towards locking in the first letter.)

Cool! Linking to the dictionary definition of the word is a nice touch :)

Great, but it's buggy. I guessed the correct word (nancy), but it rejected it. Perhaps there is something wrong with the capitalization.

Fun, but hard to play on command line versus Web app. Also, gradlew complained of the enie on line 76 for some reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com