Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time

Re:Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time by thxg on Sunday January 23, 2022 @04:53PM (#30050855)

This [1] solves it in 3.4212 average guesses 100% of the time and claims optimality, which is 99% of the difficulty it seems. For the limited 2671-word set of possible words, I think the question is now settled (for the whole 12k-word set, I don't think anyone tried anything).

It was posted here four days ago [2].

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006724

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Re:Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time by ottowinter on Sunday January 23, 2022 @06:26PM (#30051744)

Neat, didn't know that existed! Definitely would have saved me some time :)

FWIW, I wrote a similar solution a couple of days ago as well, and come up with the same result (3.421166 guesses on average, with starting word SALET). So that would support that result.

With the following strategy: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WvxRRzbvDVnHZUczHBZAko3hKft..., code: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Y8k685PS0wxvYulIxsPg...

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Re:Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time by hddqsb on Monday January 24, 2022 @11:59PM (#30068246)

There is a leaderboard at https://botfights.io/game/wordle for solving with all 12972 words as possible solutions, it might be of interest.

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Re:Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time by hnkain on Monday January 24, 2022 @06:06AM (#30056061)

It's a bit disappointing that there's been many writeups of heuristic-based solvers make the front page, but the writeup of an exact solver doesn't make it. [Note: I was the person who submitted the link to the exact solver writeup to HN].

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006724

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Re:Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time by thxg on Monday January 24, 2022 @12:38PM (#30060990)

Just to make things extra clear, the post we are commenting on has

- 99.4% in 6 guesses or less

- 3.64 guesses average

- no attempt of any formal optimality result,

while the one you posted has:

- not just 100% in 6 guesses or less (so 100% wins not 99.4%), but actually 100% in 5 guesses or less!!!

- 3.42 guesses average

- a fairly convincing optimality proof (as far as average is concerned) which was apparently the only hard part computationally.

- it also had 3 upvotes until i cross-references it here, and barely more now.

- the author seems to have plenty of twitter followers, none of which seemed to care much.

And yet if you look at the "new" page, the flow of heuristics keeps coming. Conclude what you will :-).

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Re:Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time by thxg on Sunday January 23, 2022 @05:43PM (#30051320)

Ok, I found this one [1] with 100% wins on the whole 12k-word set. But it optimizes for worst-case, not average.

[1] https://www.poirrier.ca/notes/wordle/

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