Hacker News Reader

I know how to simulate the game and get a very good strategy (or see what others have done), but I use different starting word every day because it makes it more interesting.

For the same reason, I use the previous day's solution as the starting word.

Oh that's particularly brutal after days with repeated letters.

I'm using the same strategy and I have to say it mostly is doable. I was afraid for vivid (two repeated letters) but if I remember correctly the next day was quite doable starting from vivid.

Even the worst starting word is guaranteed <= 1 average guess more than the optimal strategy though!

I wanted to do this at first, but my vocab recall is so poor (especially before morning coffee) that I found the blank slate annoying & intimidating.

> I've seen a lot of analyses of Wordle that pose this question, and I feel like these are not people who play Wordle

Interesting thought. But idunno, I am prettty into wordle, I agree with you, my goal with the daily is to get it in 3 as often as possible, but when it comes to "extracurriculars" I'm interested in all sorts of questions that are divorced with this concern. And I'm actually not that interested in deeply analyzing the part I enjoy most (getting the daily in 3).

That's certainly another possibility :)

> I'm actually not that interested in deeply analyzing the part I enjoy most (getting the daily in 3).

I think I'm similar; I've been using the same starter word since almost day 1, and despite having seen lots of very compelling evidence that it is suboptimal, I have not changed it :D

But I'm still somehow interested in what is optimal (& I guess oddly passionate about the definition of optimality).

Actually yeah, even though I'm trying to get it in 3 every day, I do not optimize my starting word. In fact I get quite some pleasure out of choosing a bad starting word (like MELEE) and then going for a 3. I wouldn't mind if wordle had an option to start with a random word (and everyone who plays that way that day has that same randomized starting word.)

That is a genius idea. Maybe the first row of coloured squares that you share can be a different colour scheme to show to others that you are playing that mode.

3 guesses makes me feel good (and lucky), four is what I expect for most puzzles, and 6 either makes me feel bad, or is a sequence like this:

BLA*E

Where I try

BLADE

BLAZE

BLARE

BLAME

Those are frustrating, but not my fault (assuming I don't re-use any letters).

Well, technically you could have realized the ambiguity in this case, and guessed a word like RAZED to clear it up.

Not if you are in hard mode.

Do people actually use hard mode? Seems like its only "harder" in the sense that it forces you to play less intelligently.

This is why I turned it off. It is "hard mode" in the same way that driving a screw with a hammer is "hard mode."

I find it fun because it prompts me to find the optimal guess (given hard mode). Playing easy mode I'm much more happy to do the first word that comes to mind and sort of fits.

Hard mode emphasizes vocabulary over math.

Spending another guess to reduce that search space is the right move (assuming you're not playing hard mode).

A guess like DREAM would guarantee the next guess is correct.

Doesn't work on hard mode, which forces you to use previously guessed letters

I didn't even know hard mode existed! I came to the game late.

This is why I switched off of hard mode, after trying it a few times. For me while it was technically harder, it lost some strategic depth and the games became a lot less interesting.

This is why, IMO, hard mode is bad.

It's in an important sense actually easier! Sure, good play results in more guesses than in not-hard-mode, but that would be like saying a 100m sprint is easier than a 2-mile race because the latter takes longer. The more interesting measure of difficulty is how hard it is play optimally. And since the search space for not-hard-mode is bigger, I'm pretty sure it's harder.

But more importantly, hard mode is also less fun, and this thread demonstrates exactly why: the creative aspect is coming up with le mot juste for quickly honing in on the right answer. Hard mode takes away your tools to do that and sometimes even results in a thoughtless guessing game.

I kinda like when "hard mode" makes you have to come up with a possible word even if it seems impossible to think of one, which can be a satisfying puzzle, not having the restriction makes it easy to think "okay screw it, I'm going to spend a guess to search for letters".

Should be named strict mode, not hard mode.

The game isn't balanced for hard mode. It's actually possible to guess 4 of the letters correctly on the first guess and still not win.

It only forces you to reuse greens. I like to play in hard hard mode in my head, where each guess must be consistent with everything previous. Still not actually hard though, obviously.

I hate to be BLASE but I don’t think that would always work.

Looks like there's 7 words that could match BLA-E (just looking at /usr/share/dict/words)

'blade', 'blake', 'blame', 'blare', 'blase', 'blate', 'blaze'

wordle tends to be more familiar words, so I'd ignore blate and blake. So now we have D, M, R, S, Z

Doesn't look like there's a word that has 4 of these letters to guarantee on next guess. So need to try for the most likely 3 letters. Could be 2 more guesses, but still ends up better than a 1 in 5 chance.

DRAMS

DERMS, DORMS, DRAMS (mentioned), DRUMS

ah my word list was missing plurals, good call

I believe only 4 are in the wordle word list though: - blade - blame - blare - blaze

I pulled the wordle word list from the page source of the game.

> Spending another guess to reduce that search space is the right move (assuming you're not playing hard mode).

This, again, depends what your goal is, or what you consider "winning". If you're only focused on avoiding losing, then yes this is the right move. If you're trying for a low score, it's not as clear, and hard mode may actually be "easier" in many ways.

No it absolutely is the way to win in the fewest moves. When you have more than 2 equally possible words then the next word should be a choice that reduces the search space rather than going for a guess.

It's the way to win in the fewest words on average.

If you want to maximize your number of three-guess-wins even if your 6-guess-failure rate is higher, it is obviously can't be a correct strategy to use your third guess on a word that you know can't be correct.

It's a gamble. 20% 3-guess win/80% 4-guess to FAIL or 100% 4-guess win.

Maximizing information from each guess until the answer is down to two candidates minimizes the number of guesses needed to win.

Sure, my point is that the metric "minimize mean number of guesses to win" isn't axiomatically the objective function: the 6 threshold already suggests that many people would rather have a "guaranteed 6 and average 5" rather than "average 4 but fail 5% percent of the time".

If someone considers a 4 to be a soft-failure then they will prefer (3,6,6) to (4,4,4) even though the latter is a lower mean number of guesses: it's a higher count of 4+ 'failures'. The strategy that considers (3,6,6) a better result than (4,4,4) wouldn't guess "dream" in the above example.

DREAM wouldn't help unless the anser is BLAZE.

If you don't like this, try https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html

Very anecdotal and personal, and non-technical, but I believe wordle words are usually very simple ones, so in your case, BLAME will stand a better chance than the remaining three. BLADE could be second.

'blade', 'blame', 'blare', and 'blaze' are all words that will be used in a wordle puzzle one day, and all equally likely to be used since it uses all words once.

The OP does link to this blogpost[0] which, while frustratingly also focuses heavily on the "worst-case" & seems to treat "winning" as "avoiding the worst-case", it does also have some numbers on decision-trees that produce highest average scores: those are linked here[1] & are much more interesting.

Reading that wiki page brings up a follow-up question:

Given:

- the optimal starter word appears to be the quite obtuse word "SALET"

- while we don't know that "SALET" won't someday be an answer, there's a common assumption among players that the answer list consists of "common" words. If I'm not mistaken this is a founded assumption

What would the rankings of the subset of optimal starter words that are "common" be (i.e. would be likely to be reasonable guesses of typical players)?

[0] https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle-optimal/

[1] http://sonorouschocolate.com/notes/index.php?title=The_best_...

It's interesting to see the averages from different decision trees and that the optimal hard mode is only 3.51 -- and that easy/hard mode are so close. It makes me wonder how much of my stats are pure luck. I'm currently sitting at exactly 3.5 after 48 hard modes (0/2/26/14/6/0) starting with SLATE, but while I feel pretty confident playing the game, I definitely have not used the "optimal strategy" every time, if I even knew that strategy in the first place.

Given how close hard mode and easy mode are, and that even when calculating averages, 4, 5 & 6 are still considered "wins", I strongly suspect changing the parameters could show hard mode to be "easier" for a "<4 or bust" goal.

> I definitely have not used the "optimal strategy" every time, if I even knew that strategy in the first place.

It's also worth noting that these models (presumably) assume an equal chance for every word in the provided dictionary, whereas - assuming the answers are "common" words - a human will likely be strongly biased toward the subset of possible answers and therefore can have much higher probabilities of success in practice than the theoretically-optimal strategies.

TALES is almost as good as a first word, and isn't obtuse.

"while we don't know that "SALET" won't someday be an answer"

Yes, we do ... all the answers and the day they will occur are known.

Was phrasing the statement from the perspective of a model "player", but I guess knowing whether "SALET" is in the answer list is not quite the same as knowing where each word is in the list, so you could semi-cheat and use the answer list as your definition of "common", without gaining too much knowledge.

Nerds will always optimize/min-max the work out of something that is supposed to be for fun, that's just a fact of life.

> The probability of winning in two guesses is about 2%, so the answer is: mostly lucky

That's for any given game, so presumably if your statistics over time are significantly higher than 2% then the answer is mostly good? Or perhaps that's a statistical fallacy akin to tossing a head 5 times in a row?

My dictionary, excluding proper names and words with punctuation, has about 4600 five-letter words. I'd add a question to your list related to how the 2315 Wordle words were chosen as an analysis of this might provide more heuristics for how to win faster.