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Comment by capitainenemo | Hacker News Reader

What frustrated me was the guessing. By equation 3 I had everything narrowed down except the 1s place in the answer which was same as number in the equation. So, I spent the next 3 guesses trying the remaining digits, and eventually losing with 2 more digits left to try.

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The trick is making guesses that you know are incorrect to rule out multiple digits at once.

What do you mean by incorrect? The equation has to be valid, according to the rules. At some point I ended up with 2 + <x> + 8 = 1<y> where x = y because of math. I had 5 guesses left and 8 possibilities. That's just gambling without the money at that point.

I guess he means construct an entirely different equation without using 2, 8 and 1 (you had same issue as me BTW).

I don't really enjoy that at all personally, but it is a thing one could do.

I don't guess impossible words in Wordle either :)

Yeah I feel the same way. I want wordle to be about guessing words, not constructing some max entropy string within the constraints.

I use that same strategy in Wordle. Most often my first word is SOARE and the second is MINTY… unless I got like three matches in the first word, it’s better to get extra data quickly.

You should give hard mode a try. That makes it a lot less repetitive and more fun.

TIL about hard mode. That's just how I've been playing naturally; force use the found letters in subsequent guesses.

It's all fun until you get something like FIGHT where the last four letters are right and have to just guess from LIGHT, MIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, TIGHT, WIGHT, anything I might have missed, and there's no way to use any strategy and you just have to randomly guess and hope you guess right.

You can guess WARMS, which will either give you the answer (to input on the next try) or eliminate 4 of the possibilities, leaving only 2 to guess.

That's a best case of 2 additional guesses and worst case of 3 (expectation of 2 1/3) which is better than your strategy, which has a best case of 1, worst case 6, expectation 3 1/2.

The comment I replied to started with "You should give hard mode a try." In hard mode, WARMS is not a valid followup guess.

That's true for regular mode, but WARMS would be an invalid guess in hard mode once the last four letters have been established as IGHT.

I can see that happening, although for some reason it hardly ever does with my usual guess strategies. I've only had one word result in a few candidates. The fact that it happened immediately and almost unavoidably in the nerdle made me think this really wasn't for me.

This situation is technically possible, but I'd be surprised to already have 4/5 letters, and not have already tested R, S, L, or N (N from NIGHT). There are all one point scrabble letters after all. I could see myself needing to roll the dice on MIGHT, TIGHT, WIGHT.

Sometimes it's what you need to do. If you know _IGHT, guessing the solution is not the best strategy since you get so little information each turn. You're much better off with FILMS or BLOWN, even if you know they can't be the solution.

Hard mode in Wordle precludes that option; after weeks in that mode in Wordle it would never occur to me to put an entirely bogus set of numbers into this.

I haven't played hard mode, but i imagine part of an optimal strategy is trying not to paint yourself into a corner like that. Just the other day, i had SHA_E and knew there were more possible solutions than i had turns left. I guessed MILKY to try 3 possibilities at once.

you can make guesses that you know won't be the correct answer but eliminate the other choices (i.e. don't include 2, 8, or 1 in your guesses)

He means guess something like: 56+34=90

Then you can see which number turns purple or use 8 if none do.

Then you try to use those 8 possibilities (if not all) in the next round to eliminate some or most of them to quickly narrow down the scope of guessing

You can test every digit and symbol in 2 guesses. Once you’ve done that it normally takes another 1 or 2 guesses to get the answer.

Yes, notably there is no hard mode. Elimination seems necessary in order to have a chance of completing in 6 tries.

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