I've given some light thought to this: There are several which are considered "good starting words", that mainly contain lots of vowels or most common used letters (such as "audio", Raise, etc). Then, as a second word, you could use another word that complements those letters (audio/rents, raise/mould ).

But there is a better strategy (similar to what is used in those interview puzzles of "From N weights, find 1 that is different in X measurements of a scale): The fact that you input some vowels and see that they are not in there, tells you that the remaining ones MUST be in the word (treating Y as a vowel as well). So it might be possible to come up with a strategy that uses that negative information as well to minimize the search space.

I still find it useful to supply the missing vowels anyway because it gives you an opportunity to find out where they are in the word.

I made a lil clone of wordle and found that the full list of solutions, past and future, is right there in the minified js. Could be useful for your analysis.

Maybe I shouldn't be sharing this, it's a bit sad to break the illusion that the creator is picking a new word for us every day.

I had always assumed it was a random word from a dictionary. I didn’t think someone was actually choosing a word manually :)

I went to the source code of wordle & copied all 12000 words to an excel sheet Column A, starting from row 4.

3rd row for next 18 columns has drop down filter.

You guess any word with at least 2 vowels, if 3 better, no repeat letters. You get some grey, some yellow, some maybe green.

2nd column to 6th column on excel sheet is the Grey Letters, Not Found in Answer. In this, 2nd row, if u find any grey you type it here. The formula from row 4 downwards in this group checks if its top input cell is empty, if yes, true, if not empty, then it check if that letter exists in its row cell of column A. If exists, false (grey means no letter), otherwise true.

Column 7th to 11 are yellow. Same thing, row 2 gets input, 4th row onwards checks if this exists in Column A cell, true, otherwise false. If input cell empty, then True.

Column 12 to 16 gets green letter input. Here input goes by position, if 2nd letter is green, you type it in 2nd column of this group, which is 13th column.

Formula in 4th and next checks if input empty, true, otherwise if input exist in exact position, true, otherwise false.

17th column is empty & narrow, to create a gap.

18th column returns 0 if any false found in while row. Any false means this word is not the answer. Otherwise returns 1.

A separate one cell counts all those 1, tells me how many potential answers are. After every try/word, one can filter this last column on 1.

You are looking for Information Gain and Mutual Information (concepts from information theory). Have fun!

This website is currently hosting a competition until the end of the month for Wordle strategies if you want to see how it compares: https://botfights.io/game/wordle

Interestingly, I made a coding challenge for this exact problem a few years ago. You can find it on the Code Golf StackExchange website: https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/26858/guess-the.... The challenge is named after the Lingo TV show which used the concept repopularized by Wordle. Lingo itself took inspiration from a 1955 paper game named Jotto. Regarding strategies used in the challenge, the best performing solution was an adaptation of a Mastermind solver.

My first two guesses are usually AUDIO and RENTS if it helps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I use WEIRD, my completely untested and I researched intuition being that knowing common consonants are in a word isn’t helpful unless you get the right place, but knowing the vowels is. At least that was my logic when I first played and my brain produced WEIRD.

I’m sure it’s far from optimal, but I continue to use it because I obviously understand how I came to choose it, and it “works” and survivor bias is powerful :)

I recall seeing HN posts from people working out “optimal” starting words and guess patterns, but I just like mine :)

I use ADIEU to get 4 wovels, likely the same reason you picked AUDIO.

SLATE/ROUND/PICKY has been a 8/8 for getting the correct word on the 4th guess since I started using it.

Since you've been looking into it, how are words with multiple of the same letters treated on Wordle. If there are two (or three) 'E' in the solution or the guess?

I've spent some time analyzing Wordle (my starting words are SOARE and then BUILT, unless I've already got strong clues from SOARE).

If the answer has one E and you guess a word with two Es, only one of the Es will be marked correct (green/yellow). If one of the Es is in the correct place, it will be green and the other one grey. Otherwise the first E will be yellow and the second grey. So if the answer has fewer Es than your guess the game tells you.

If the answer has more Es than your guess there is no indication of this.

Today 538 gave the optimal starting word and all the best second words, with a 60% chance of solving it in three words. Completely ruined the game, in my opinion.

There is one solution which is very close to what you're describing. Read if you want to ruin the fun for yourself.

https://aditya-sengupta.github.io/coding/2022/01/13/wordle.h...

I think single level is not enough for the best guess. There is a maximum depth ( 6 guesses ). So strategy should consider also this limit.