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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

I tried playing this as if its wordle & got it in 2 guesses. How do they do this ??? That's next to impossible in wordle & the probalities seem like they should be the same?

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By playing Wordle well, you are essentially eliminating as much unknown words as possible each turn, e.g., SALET alone takes 12974 words down to 34 here today.

But this is like Wordle hard mode with the forced letters, so the optimal strategy is probably to invert and eliminate as little words as possible each turn.

I got pretty far here using weird words, but PIZZA turned out to be a terrible first guess for Don't Wordle (eliminating ~75% of the words):

    *      12974
    PIZZA   3169
    AQUAS    290
    SAWED     17
    MEASE      7
    LEASH      0

Wordle hard mode (which I play) generally limits you to a similar degree as this game - it's less strict programmatically, but anyone willingly opting into hard mode is likely following the same rules as are enforced here.

So it should be the same.

(assuming here that you're deliberately attempting to lose this game).

No, the strategy in Wordle of solving hard mode by guessing the target word vs in Not Wordle preserving along as possible in Not Wordle by not guessing the target word are not the same thing at all.

Huh?!

I think you really did just get lucky. It does pick a word up front at the start.

The game is cheating I guess

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