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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

There isn’t a hard mode strategy that assures a win, though. You have to get lucky or lose sometimes.

You can always win even in hard mode with perfect play: https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle-optimal/

> In hard mode, Wordle can be solved in 3.5076 guesses on average (with 6 guesses at worst, i.e. 100% of the time). Or, with a different decision tree, it can be solved with a slightly worse average, but always within 5 guesses

Only if you cheat by referring to the list of solution words. No strategy with a 6-guess worst case is possible without referring to that list.

How is that cheating? The dictionary is part of the game.

The subset of words that are solutions is an internal data structure of the game. It is clearly cheating to refer to that list. If you are willing to examine the inside of the game's black box, the optimal strategy is to simply extract today's answer.

As a human, you already have knowledge which is similar to knowing the internal dictionary: you can judge what other kinds of words Wordle is likely to avoid (uncommon words, proper nouns, plurals). So I don't think it is cheating.

Depends on what you're testing. Are we just testing your memory or recall?

Thing is, you can develop a very strong intuition for which words are in that list: they're all common words and mostly "main dictionary entries" (you probably won't find a 4 letter noun or verb with "s" tacked onto the end, probably not "ed" or "es" either)

Certainly using the exact list is a step beyond that; but you can in fact get very accurate at guessing which words might be on it without memorizing the list

In the limit, if there was one day of Wordle left and you looked at what it was going to be and then told me that the optimal strategy of which words to guess is to just guess the solution as the first guess, that's cheating. Your "strategy" becomes a question of how well can you compress the list of solutions into the entropy allowed by how you chose to express your strategy, in this case "four 5-letter words" or somewhere between 20 and 94 bits of entropy[0].

[0] 4*5 assuming that 1 letter is one bit of entropy, which is a rule of thumb when you're compressing gigabytes of text to log2(26^(4*5)) if we just count the combinations of letters

"Cheating" is subjective, but you are correct. To put it in more neutral terms: Using the known 2309-word list of solutions, hard mode can be solved 100% of the time within 6 guesses. Not using it, you would need 7 guesses to guarantee that you solve it every time [1].

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

I think most wordle players would know the entire dictionary. It's quite a restricted wordlist in fact.

Sorry, can you explain what you mean here: I play hard mode and I always get the word within 6 guesses — and I’m no savant, I’m an idiot, and I don’t cheat — no looking at the word list. The same is true for my friends who play on hard mode: no cheating, always finish. Why is luck required for hard mode?

That's luck, which is fine. But there is not an optimal strategy which if followed always result in a win for the actual Wordle games. Some of them require at least 7 guesses in hard mode.

I lost this week on FOYER without repeated letters, there are plenty of words with ER endings and O as a second letter. —- VOICE LONER TOWER JOKER POSER HOMER ——-

The last two were unlikely to be the word, but I try to finish in only a few minutes and those popped to my head before foyer. But I could have guessed BOXER or DOPER or some other words I’m sure. When I’ve lost it’s usually because I have 3 letters and guessing only 2 new letters at a time doesn’t let you eliminate the other options fast enough.

Yeah this was the exact one I was thinking.

Our wordle slack group lots of people lost on foyer.

I had started with some random word with lots of consonants (all black result), so when I got to having just o e and r, I only had two clear possibilities I could see left with three guesses.

LOVER BOXER POWER CODER... broke my steak of 90...

Wordle works with a 12k-word dictionary, which is very much comprehensive (that includes "words" like "grrrl"). However, the hidden/secret words are picked from a much smaller set of 2k reasonable words (i.e., frequent ones, and that most people would describe as English words).

There are two reasons that you always win within 6 guesses:

1. It has been shown [1] that in hard mode you can always solve wordle in 6 guesses (but not always in 5) if you assume that the hidden word is "reasonable", i.e., taken from the 2k-word list. However, if you know 12k 5-letter English words and if you don't assume that the hidden word is "reasonable", then you will sometimes need 7 guesses.

2. Even then, the average number of guesses that you need is much lower, at 3.5 guesses (or 4.5 using all 12k words). So if you play optimally or close to it, it is only in very rare cases (the worst case) that you will need the full 6 or 7 guesses.

So, surprisingly, the game is easier if you are not a "savant", or to be more precise, if you are not a computer :-).

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

It’s true you can get into a hole, but there are strategies that help, like the one the person you’re replying to mentioned. It also helps to get a sense for what kinds of words wordle uses (e.g. no plurals). That being said, it’s the possibility of losing that makes it exciting!

I’ve played 113 times on hard mode and only lost once so far, guessing between two possibilities on the sixth word.

For a while now I’ve just been starting with the previous day’s word to mix things up, rather than trying to use the most optimal starters.

https://jonathanolson.net/wordle-solver

salet, cramp

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