I hope the third point stays unchanged too. Too many services out there optimize for engagement, the expense being the encouragement of addictive behaviors.
Everything to do with the game is hard coded into the client. I doubt there's any plan to change that. But I wouldn't be surprised if clones popped up that tried to maximize engagement/revenue.
I've already found a clone that lets me play as many words as desired with as many characters. The only downside is that I've burnt myself out two days after discovering Wordle.
Agreed. Only one word a day makes me take my time and use the fewest guesses possible instead of brute forcing it by reusing dead letters. It feels more like a puzzle than a game, and the novelty lasts longer. I don’t think it would be getting the traction it has if it allowed endless play. It’s a throwback to the daily rebus/crossword/quiz newspaper page.
The game's great but I'm puzzled why no one mentions that this is a verbatim copy of Lingo, a 1987 tv show that's been adapted in many countries. I used to watch this in France where it was very successful. Once people got too good at 5-letter words, they ran 6, then 7, and finally 8 letters.
It's obviously very standard (and has been done a million times before and after Lingo... probably as long as language has existed) but it's all about the execution here.
> Fun fact: this concept is also the basis for a game show on Dutch national TV. I took part two years ago, and spent way too much time optimising our strategy: https://vincenttunru.com/hacking-a-gameshow/
In the 1960's my dad programmed Jotto (a simpler five letter secret word game) on Kodak's computers. Entropy became the first interesting mathematical concept that I learned.
Log base 2 of the remaining words is a measure of how many yes/no questions it would take to identify the word. An entropy strategy looks for a clue word that minimizes the expected value of this measure. One optimizes sum p log p over the pile sizes.
Pure mathematicians prefer certain concepts with a religious fervor. Often this has been informed by a reasonable number of problems where a concept has been proven optimal. The best applied mathematicians understand pure math but prefer practical work. To a pure mathematician, the rest are just guessing.
Here, one needs a clearly stated objective function for measuring success. Entropy strategies are often optimal for simple objective functions.
A critical detail for this game: The secret words come from a shorter list than the valid guess words. One wants a guess word that best partitions the shorter list of secret word candidates, not the full list of valid guess words.
Hah funny to see other people strategizing like this..
I did some research and (from what I found) the most common letters in English are:
E, O, T, A, I, R, N, H, S (not in any order)
So I came up with TRAIN and SHOVE as 2 starting words that use all those letters without repeats, plus V.
WORLD is also a good one because it uses one of the most common starting letters (W, T, A, O, D) and one of the most common ending letters (E, D, S, T).
Some other good starting words for me have been RIVET, CANDY, PLUCK and BASTE.
I do not. According to the original article, Wordle uses[1] 2,500 common words out of the 12,000 5-letter words in the english language[2]. I use the 5 letter words in the collins scrabble dictionary (which is about 12,000 words).
The assumption you need to make for my analysis to be correct is that the letter patterns in the 2,500 possible answers is statistically similar to the distribution of letter patterns in the original 12,000. There are probably some differences between the distributions, and I'd love to rerun my code with the actual word list Wordle uses, but in the absence of that list, I think that my code does about as good as possible.
[1] uses for the answers; I assume it allows all 12,000 for guesses.
[2] NYTimes does not specify which source they used
I did some analysis on this last week [https://noxville.medium.com/raising-the-wordle-first-guess-b...], ROATE left the lowest average valid answers (60.424) but 195 in the worst case. RAISE was the second best average (61.0) but a much better worst case of 168 words. Both are just heuristics, there might be a better word than either if the game were solved.
Yes, it's in the list of guessable words - however it's not a valid answer word. You need to use the WORDLE word list in order to evaluate how good or bad your initial guess is, using another word list will provide distorted results.
That's what I was clarifying with 'Yes, it's in the list of guessable words - however it's not a valid answer word'.
They have two lists of words: one is a list of possible answers, and another is a list of extra (valid) words which can be guessed (in addition to the words in the answer list). Sometimes it might be better to use a non-answer word as a guess: the best case gets worse (since you cannot win immediately) but the average case and worst case both get better.
> You are trying to use the word that once you get the match result back, it discards the most number of words.
This isn't strictly true either. Two N-sized subsets of words from a common initial set might have completely different difficulty in reducing further, because in the worst case there might not be a valid guess which nicely spreads the remaining words out among the 243 possible outcomes for that guess.
Set-size is a good heuristic, but it's just that - a heuristic.
Yes, as you'll see in the readme that I have numbers for both approaches. The first section is the average number of remaining words after getting the match result back, and the second section is the average number of yellow and green squares.
You might also try maximum instead of average. This is minimax and represents worst case scenarios for each guess.
This is mostly useful for optimal play against an opponent (which is not the case here). Imagine an adversarial version where the opponent doesn't have to commit to a word at the beginning but must reveal one matching all clues if you can't get it in 6 guesses (basically, they can change their word when you guess and you are trying to make that impossible).
I think it's an archaic spelling of the verb "steer". I remember the edition of Treasure Island I had as a boy has Long John Silver use it in the line "We can stear a course, but who's to set one?" when they are discussing whether to mutiny.
Though when I google that phrase, Silver uses the modern spelling.
I’ve played twice now and had trouble. Today I had to resort to “cheating” using a scrabble word search site. Because I didn’t know that was allowed/possibly required.
In France, we had Motus [0], which is the same thing but with longer words — and it's actually an adaptation of Dutch version of Lingo! It ran on France 2 for 29 seasons and is widely known in French popular culture.
This has become one of my favorites since I learned about it from NYT. It's more fun if you use the "hard mode" where your next word attempt has to include the right letters/spaces found in the prior try.
I built a version of Bulls and Cows at https://cowbull.co/, mainly for my kids to play. One difference in Wordle is that when there is a match, Wordle shows which letters matched. In Bulls and Cows, it just tells the number of letters which matched, which makes it a bit more difficult in some ways.
Yes, if like me you search the source for the word you just won with, you will see future answers, as they are listed in order (at least the preceding word was yesterday's answer)
I've been playing this as a road trip game since a friend introduced me to it in high school. Depending on the age of the people playing (and/or the fraction of concentration the driver needs to devote to driving) we also play with 3- or 4-letter words. 6 is a bit much for me to keep track of in my head.
If you happen to be on an Apple device, may I humbly suggest you look up "Three Magic Words" on the app store. It's a different take on the same root game, sometimes called "Jotto" or "Ghost."
I tried this game the last couple of days and I don't get the appeal. There is some skill involved, but there is also a huge amount of luck. For example yesterday I had "ti_er". I guessed "timer" but the actual word was "tiger". That left me with a score of 5 instead of 4. Does that say anything about my skill level as a player? Honestly, this seems to mostly be a marketing success story about the sharing score functionality and how that led to virality on Twitter.
The appeal of vocabulary games is that they encourage you to flex your memory. They remind you of words you know that you might not use under normal circumstances.
As for the luck, sure, there's some of that. But you have plenty of guesses to get to the word if you play according to letter frequency, and always maximize the information you'll get out of a guess. Think of it like counting cards. The goal is to shift the odds as much in your favor as possible. Most games are like that. Deterministic, perfect-information games are a just a small subset of games.
But the goal isn't just to complete the puzzle. At least in my social circle, there is much more focus on the score rather than on just completing it. There are other word games that have a much better balance of skill and luck. The NYT Spelling Bee game mentioned in the article is one example.
My friend group doesn't focus on score, we just celebrate getting lucky or lament if we take until the last try.
There is a point about luck taking away from the longevity of the game. Unless the developer adds more game dimensions (in the same minimal, non-intrusive way) I kinda think most people will stop playing in a few months
Of course it's luck based - it's mastermind with a preset number of mnemonic arrangements. I struggle with it too, but the problem with systems thinking is that you don't get to enjoy the magic which drives the fad.
If one must judge performance in this game, then they shouldn't put much weight into the final score. That's why the share game button shows your progression. It tells a story that other players can understand. I learned to guess without using known correct letters by seeing games shared by friends. I know counting theory, I know Bayes, but it still wasn't a strategy I came up with on my own. The game is just something fun to do at a time where that is in short supply.
The skill is in not leaving yourself with two words that would both fit. If earlier you had tried a word with both an 'm' and a 'g' such as 'image' you would not have been left in a position where you would have to have a lucky guess
It is much easier to work backwards with that logic than forward. It is impossible to both try to guess the word while also trying to eliminate all possible overlaps that may occur with whatever results you get from the previous word. In this specific instance, I would have never played "image" because my first word was "tears" so I immediately knew there was a t, e, and r. There was no reason to try to determine if there was a g or m until I was presented with "ti_er".
It's only "luck" if you actually know all the words - most people do passively, but can they find the right one actively? That's part of the 'skill'. The other part is constructing a mental graph that allows you to find your way to the correct word within 6 steps, regardless of the word. An interesting question is whether there is actually any luck involved and how much. i.e. What is the optimal graph reducing the luck factor to a minimum, and is there a perfect one, if you know all words in the game?
People who say "it's just luck" either don't know, or don't care - but it's neither a correct, nor a clever position.
I went TIMER, TILER, TIGER and scraped in. I had been getting most in 3-4 attempts prior to that.
The aspect I don’t love is that in forcing dictionary words to be attempted, people can rely on that at the end rather than winning through word knowledge. My 9yo plays it and generally does well but was bailed out once by this.
- Simple
- One puzzle a day, and everyone plays the same one so you can share and compare scores
- No account creation, logins, ads, subscriptions, data mining
All the right ingredients for going viral. I just hope the last point stays unchanged.