[HN Gopher] My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time
___________________________________________________________________
My lazy Wordle strategy: same words every time
Author : bucket2015
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-04-22 19:53 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (i-kh.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (i-kh.net)
| slyall wrote:
| I start with REAIS and YOUTH.
|
| But I don't think it is a good idea for the average person to
| have too many set words. Unless you have great knowledge of the
| dictionary of legal words you might need extra clues to word
| order etc. ie I recently got a game with a letter repeated 3
| times.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Got RENEE last night. I just threw it in because nothing else
| was making sense with the letters we had available.
|
| I like AUDIO and PIOUS as vowel removers depending on what's
| already in and out. FRUIT has also served me well.
| vharuck wrote:
| REACT
|
| PIOUS
|
| Hits all the vowels except Y. But I feel like it's not so great.
| Wish I could replace the P with something more useful.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I do RAISE and COULD often.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Spoiler, stop reading if you started playing worldle in the
| past 3 months.
|
| I used could a lot until it became one of my o my 2-guess
| wins. Now I hate using it knowing there is zero chance it's
| the answer. I still do occasionally if someone after 3
| guesses all 5 of those letters are available, which is almost
| never.
| mod wrote:
| My friend opens with ADIEU
|
| I think it's bad strategy, but might help meet your goals,
| because D is pretty good.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| CLEAR
|
| PIOUS
|
| I also want to hit all vowels ASAP, and I'm also dissatisfied
| with that P.
| Ishmaeli wrote:
| ADIEU
|
| STROY
|
| All the vowels and the three most common consonants in two
| words.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| Do you mean STORY, not STROY?
| mostertoaster wrote:
| Since switching to hard mode, I almost never start with "good
| words". Too much risk of getting the 10 possibilities with 3
| guesses remaining type situation.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Same. I start with QUARK every time. It's mostly to one day
| achieve that elusive 1-guess solution but it often ends up
| making my life easier by avoiding pigeonholing myself on hard
| mode.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I always go SOARE GLINT DUCKY WHOMP. I've never missed with
| this (so far).
| jeffbee wrote:
| There isn't a hard mode strategy that assures a win, though.
| You have to get lucky or lose sometimes.
| shawnz wrote:
| 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
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| thxg wrote:
| "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=Th
| e_best_...
| gizmo686 wrote:
| How is that cheating? The dictionary is part of the game.
| [deleted]
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| 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.
| kupopuffs wrote:
| Depends on what you're testing. Are we just testing your
| memory or recall?
| furyofantares wrote:
| 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
| phphphphp wrote:
| 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?
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| mostertoaster wrote:
| 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.
| thxg wrote:
| 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_...
| [deleted]
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| __s wrote:
| https://jonathanolson.net/wordle-solver
|
| salet, cramp
| [deleted]
| mplanchard wrote:
| 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.
| jv22222 wrote:
| My goto 1st 3 words are: SNORT, ADIEU, GLYPH
| sharmi wrote:
| My list
|
| STARE BLIND CHUMP
| tristor wrote:
| I use SHITE, ACORN, then do targeted guessed from there.
| willis936 wrote:
| For most woodland herbivores: acorn comes before shite.
| fsckboy wrote:
| switch to ADORN
| [deleted]
| mmastrac wrote:
| ADIEU
|
| PORTS (or FORTY if ADIEU doesn't match anything)
|
| I just want all the vowels.
| a5b6ff wrote:
| Using the "same words every time" (i.e., a fixed set of initial
| guesses) has been studied before [1,2,3]. It is one of the few
| remaining open questions about Wordle. Interestingly, it can be
| done in 6+1 guesses [4] (COMBO FATTY GRRRL SPUDS VENGE WHILK,
| then the possibilities are always narrowed down to a singleton).
| However, it is unknown whether it is possible within 5+1 guesses,
| which would make Wordle 100% solvable even with such a
| constrained approach!
|
| It is unfortunate that 3Blue1Brown's excellent video has been so
| often misquoted as providing "optimal" guesses for Wordle. Of
| course, one can legitimately argue that using maths takes the fun
| out of the game... but if we *are* going to use maths, then the
| information entropy approach is simply not the one most suited to
| this specific game (because the dictionary is fully known).
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30094398
|
| [2] https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle-optimal/#fixed-guesses
|
| [3] https://github.com/alexandres/magicwordschallenge
|
| [4] https://github.com/alexandres/magicwordschallenge/issues/2
| CPLX wrote:
| I start every Wordle with the word PENIS in order to assert
| dominance over the puzzle.
| dazc wrote:
| Just use a random word, luck will do the rest.
| kzrdude wrote:
| This is what I do, just use some word. Don't care so much about
| the score, just to get it within the allowed guesses. Would be
| boring to make a recipe.
| furyofantares wrote:
| For the variants I've programmed, I've enforced that they start
| with a random word guessed (same random word for everyone
| though.)
|
| Wordle is good as it is but personally I think most of the
| variants would be better off adopting this feature.
|
| That said I saw someone speedrunning 10x Xordle games and for
| speedrunning they just ignore the starting word and make the
| same 4 guesses every time: CARVE SHIFT GODLY WHUMP
| 8note wrote:
| Was that fireb0rn? I remember him doing a speed run on
| hollowkight where every 30s or so, he'd have to solve a
| wordle
| mod wrote:
| How many variants have you programmed?
|
| Why?
| furyofantares wrote:
| Wordle sparked off sort of a global game jam around
| variants, maybe because it was such a wholesome project.
| And these variants have found players; there's a lot of
| people who play a whole bunch of daily word games, there's
| some youtubers, etc.
|
| I've programmed 3; the way that went down is I was curious
| if an idea I had would be fun (two Wordles on the same
| board, sort of a mix between Wordle and a word jumble since
| you don't know which word the clues go to.) Since there was
| an open source implementation this only took me one night,
| and it was in fact fun and started gaining some traction as
| https://xordle.xyz
|
| Then some game designer friends suggested their own takes
| and I implemented those too: https://fibble.xyz lies to you
| once per row, and https://warmle.org tells you if you're
| close to the right letter rather than if a letter is in the
| wrong spot which gives the gameplay a very different feel
| forinti wrote:
| I always start with SNAIL ROUTE.
|
| Those are the 10 most common letters in 5-letter words. Even if I
| get good hits with SNAIL, I enter ROUTE.
| iso1210 wrote:
| I play in Hard Mode, so that type of method rarely works
| mimimi31 wrote:
| I've also been playin on hard mode almost since the
| beginning. While it usually does make the game more
| interesting, it also annoyingly often makes your win depend
| on pure luck. Ironically this happens more often when your
| first guesses were very good.
|
| Imagine having SHA?E confirmed and now being forced to
| stupidly guess between SHAPE, SHAKE, SHARE, SHAME, SHAVE or
| SHADE instead of eliminating half of those possibilities with
| a single word.
|
| So maybe this implementation of a hard mode isn't well suited
| anyway if you're looking for a bigger challenge in skill.
| idunno246 wrote:
| I found that only happens if you try to hit the most common
| letters in your first guesses. If you use middle of the
| road letters you tend to get only a couple while
| eliminating a lot - s and e would be bad early letters
| because they don't reduce enough words
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Yeah I started off only playing hard mode until they threw
| in a SHA?E word. Then I realized it's only hard because it
| isn't fair.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| If you run into that situation, then just turn off hard
| mode and put PRIDE to eliminate some words.
| weego wrote:
| I have settled on DREAM PILOT (I often don't use pilot if I get
| 2 or more yellow/green) with no reason other than I'm pig
| headed and refuse strategies others suggest.
| AggroVanGogh wrote:
| STARE DOING CHUMP is usually enough for me to have a good stab
| at Quordle. For regular Wordle I try to stick to "hard mode",
| with the constraint that discovered letters have to be used.
| bazzargh wrote:
| I hadn't seen anyone else use that pair when I suggested it in
| early Jan
| https://twitter.com/bazzargh/status/1477998502747779079 ... but
| I guess there aren't many choices with those letters and other
| people were bound to hit on those words! Seems quite popular
| now.
|
| For octordle/sedecordle I found that the 2 standard guesses
| wasn't enough to stop getting stuck, particularly it's missing
| Y for words that use that as a vowel. For those puzzles, I use
| INPUT SHAME GLORY, but I've not attempted to check if this is
| anything like optimal - I very rarely fail those puzzles with
| these 3 tho.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't regularly play octordle but came to the conclusion
| that you really want at least 3 start words. Otherwise, you
| start trying to solve with guesses that aren't globally
| optimum and run out of guesses.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've settled on the following word list to determine if 20 of 26
| characters are present within 4 guesses: thank
| fuels crowd gimpy
|
| If there are fewer than 5 letters present, "bevvy" will eliminate
| another two ('b' and 'v'), leaving j, q, x, and z as the
| remaining possible characters. These occur rarely (though
| "pizza", "bijou", and "vixen" can be challenging targets. More
| usually, it's words with either doubled characters, such as
| "onion" or "lalai", or those which have viable anagrams ("spams"
| and "spasm", "donor" and "rondo") that will throw me.
| ghaff wrote:
| The thing is that this doesn't help you with double letters,
| still leaves out some less common letters, and leaves you with
| very little margin for error at that point.
|
| On Octordle, 4 words seem easiest although it makes the game
| more of an anagram solving exercise and in my limited
| experience didn't give me much of a consistent score advantage
| vs. three.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've used that strategy on 100s of standard Wordle games to
| good effect. It's not perfect, but it solves ~98-99% of all
| games attempted.
|
| (That stat comes from one of the multi-play Wordle imitations
| which does in fact track success rates.)
|
| I don't recall mean attemtps, though I believe it's still
| between 3-4 tries.
|
| Once most characters are tested, it's usually pretty clear
| what the actual word is, and some familiarity with the actual
| wordlist (which I picked up merely by playing the game, not
| by examining source), the harder cases also become pretty
| obvious.
|
| Doubled letters and anagrams are the most difficult cases.
| archi42 wrote:
| Obviously anyone can play however they like and how they enjoy
| the game. But I feel like this "enter three optimized words and
| win" is too easy. So instead I go with hard mode, and have to
| think some more. I still start with the same word every time, but
| from there on most parts vary. I also allow myself to fall back
| to normal mode if finding the word depends on pure luck (e.g.
| _ATCH).
|
| Bonus: If you and your friends play hard mode, you can try to do
| a reverse wordle on their solutions.
| taberiand wrote:
| My strategy on hard mode is to start with words containing
| uncommon letters, using new starting words each time to keep it
| fun. That way I find the "*atch" problem is reduced because
| (hopefully) the number of possible options has already been
| narrowed down.
|
| My histogram is mostly 4's, with 2 losses in around 100 games,
| so I think I'm doing something right.
| skhm wrote:
| exact same strat, exactly 2 losses in 100 games, gave up at
| 100. two anecdata is data, right?
| jezzamon wrote:
| I actually made a Wordle variant me and my family have been
| playing that prevents you using a word you have ever used before
| (unless it is that day's word). It's a really small tweak and it
| takes a while to have any impact, but it makes the game so much
| more interesting for me. (jezzamon.com/wordle if anyone wants to
| try it)
|
| No idea if it'll become unplayable eventually but I'm having fun
| seeing it play out as more and more common words get locked out
| LgWoodenBadger wrote:
| I came here to suggest this as an optional improvement.
| ceautery wrote:
| Originally I used BLACK, WHITE, SOUND, and tried to guess from
| there, occasionally throwing in GRUMP if the word wasn't obvious.
| I didn't like the repeated vowel, and knowing if there was a Y in
| the word would help, so I switched to:
|
| AMUCK FETID SWORN GLYPH
|
| 100% so far. One or two of those may have involved aggressively
| grepping /usr/share/dict/words, though.
| mod wrote:
| I've used STEAL, ROUND for almost the entire ~80 games I've
| played, and I'm still 100% so far, no assistance or grepping.
| (Notably very close to the author's first two guesses he came
| up with without assistance)
|
| I have a go-to third guess when needed, I just can't think of
| it right now.
| [deleted]
| flerchin wrote:
| For octordle I like CORNY and ADIEU for my first two guesses.
| Gets all the vowels and enough to start. For wordle, starting
| from STERN or a few other words like that is fine.
|
| Josh Wardle is a cultural icon. He's really done an amazing
| thing.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Once you figure this out and figure out what words those should
| be, it ruins the game.
| kcartlidge wrote:
| Opinions vary based on the input text, but the English letter
| frequency list I use starts ETAONRISH in descending frequency.
|
| Based on that, coupled with a little bit of insight on English
| words (as opposed to random collections of 5 letters) I've ended
| up with ALIEN, STORM, CHUMP as my regular first 3. Sometimes I
| deviate if the earlier rows offer insight, and sometimes I swap
| the first 2 based on a whim.
|
| And unless it is obviously worth a try, I use my first 3 words to
| _eliminate_ letters and _not_ to guess.
|
| I usually get it in 4, sometimes in 5, almost never needing 6,
| and have failed once. So not necessarily the best, but good
| enough.
| lostlogin wrote:
| A lot of the suggested methods are doing what was suggested to
| me, but indirectly.
|
| Guess all the vowels early. TRADE and PIOUS is how I usually do
| it, but ALIEN may be a better starter.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| +1 for PIOUS, and don't sleep on AUDIO.
| Kiro wrote:
| You're obviously playing easy mode or you wouldn't be able to
| use that strategy. I recommend enabling hard mode.
| donarb wrote:
| My strategy is to never use the same start word, I like using a
| random word each time as that changes the path to solving. I
| might pick a random word from another open browser window, maybe
| from a news article or something like that. If I get stuck after
| the second or third try, I'll pick another random word, even if
| it contains a few discarded letters in order to ferret out 1 or 2
| more valid letters.
|
| For me, the best part of Wordle is not in finding the answer but
| in the steps prior as I work out the path to solving the correct
| answer.
| stevesearer wrote:
| Using different starting words makes Wordle feel more like a
| word game as opposed to a strategy optimization game.
| HigherPlain wrote:
| I'm with you, I try and use a different word whilst keeping it
| plausibly common, it's part of the cerebral challenge. Using an
| algorithmic approach is efficient but not "fun". Target is
| always 3.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| If my wife and I want to challenge ourselves, we'll start with
| the solution to the previous puzzle as our first guess.
| blakeburch wrote:
| We do the same. It makes the puzzle have variety while still
| allowing healthy competition since we're always starting with
| the same word.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This reduces the impact of randomness, which is a good
| thing I think. It's too easy for choice of first word to
| dictate the result.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Another vote for this strategy to keep the game interesting.
|
| Putting the same words in at the start got boring after the
| third game, and the first word dictates the on-the-fly logic to
| select the next, and so on.
|
| It all comes down to how you want to play. Using maths
| optimises "winning", but not using maths challenges ones
| situational intellect. I prefer the latter.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I always start with ADIEU and THORN. CLASP sometimes next. But I
| solve in 3 most often.
| hi5eyes wrote:
| Aurei and Ghost get you most of the way
| lcnmrn wrote:
| There are 28 letters. With 3 initial same words you can cover up
| to 53.5% of the alphabet. With 4 initial same words you can cover
| up to 71.4%. There are only 5 vowels A, E, I, O and U which can
| be covered with the first two words. You can even add Y in the
| first two words played.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Wordle only uses 26 of those letters.
| geophile wrote:
| An average of about 3.8 is not hard to achieve. Much harder is to
| reduce the number of failures, (i.e., requiring more than 6
| guesses). At least in hard mode, that's true. I'm experimenting
| with easy mode now.
| 121789 wrote:
| Easy mode is different. The goal is essentially to get as many
| 3s as possible while minimizing number of 5s. With any skill,
| actually losing will be almost impossible
| smbv wrote:
| Roate
|
| Pulis
|
| Chynd
|
| This does more than half of the alphabet for the most frequently
| used letters.
|
| https://slc.is/posts/bestwordlestrategy.html
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Never heard of any of those three words, thanks for the vocab
| addition.
| tromp wrote:
| I always start, very ego-centrically, with my last name (matching
| my HN account name), and then usually follow up with BEADS and
| JUICY to cover all the vowels. But I'll try guess the target word
| if the first or first two words give me >= 3 hits. Then I'll
| spend WAY more time trying to solve the 5 daily chess puzzles at
| https://www.chess.com/puzzles/rated ...
| AnonC wrote:
| I thought it was in that linked video or somewhere that I found a
| list of starting words to try to make it easier to solve it based
| on letter frequency and getting a few vowels in within the scope
| of the Wordle word list (not a dictionary list).
|
| These are the words I use:
|
| SOARE
|
| TREAD (or TRADE, which is an anagram)
|
| ADIEU
|
| By default my game play is like "hard mode" (only use letters
| already found to be correct and avoid letters found to be
| incorrect). That helps most of the time.
|
| One of the annoying (or challenging) things about Wordle is that
| its word list has many sets of words that differ by just one
| letter. For example, you may get _ATCH right and then have to
| really guess if it's going to be CATCH or BATCH or PATCH or MATCH
| or WATCH or LATCH or HATCH (maybe there are more words with a
| different first letter in this range). I've seen several sets of
| words like this. Just can't do this within six total guesses. So
| chance does matter.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| My wife and I don't care about the end result in those
| situations since the fun has been removed at that point. We
| just iterate through until we're right or have run through our
| chances.
|
| On to the next game!
| adenozine wrote:
| I thought this too at first, but this is where the real
| strategy comes out, because you can guess MULCH and that will
| tell you if it's LATCH or MATCH. or CLIMB, that would also
| eliminate BATCH. There's intelligent ways to guess to eliminate
| more letters. Hard mode is only hard because it eliminates this
| possibility of constraint narrowing.
|
| I think Hard Mode is not a good name for it. The game is
| already plenty hard.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| I think Strict Mode is a better name.
| jaytaylo wrote:
| Crane
|
| Might
|
| Plows
|
| ---
|
| 95% success rate.
| lysp wrote:
| Similar to mine: CRANE, SPOIL, MIGHT then sometimes BUNDY
| jet_32951 wrote:
| CRANE first. If the A and E are not both present and there are
| no green consonants, HOIST, else figure out a word that tests
| common di- or triglyphs (ch, cri) based on known letters that
| also contains O.
| womitt wrote:
| COUNT + RAISE for me
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I've been starting with LATER and SONIC, then adding DUMPY if I
| still don't have a clue.
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(page generated 2022-04-24 23:01 UTC)