[bmitc]

I've written a Wordle solver in F#. It's interesting because your first word contains the five most probable letters. My solver starts off by selecting, at random, one of the possible words that have these five letters.

Could you say more how you've determined your solver to be deterministic in 6 steps?

Also, I'm not sure I understand what this means:

> It selects a word to minimize the number of words assuming the worst-case green/yellow.

Particularly the part "assuming the worst-case green/yellow". Do you mind elaborating?

[salomon812]

So, my algorithm is deterministic because there isn't any random element in it. And then it appears the adversarial doesn't either because the game plays out the same way every time.

So, to generate a single guess, the algorithm will basically try every single word in the dictionary against every possible remaining word. For any given guess, it tracks the count of various possible scorings. The scorings are the positions of greens, and yellows for a total of 243 possible scorings. After looping through all possible remaining words, it finds the max occurrence count within the scoring array. That maximum count becomes that guess's overall utility. It then finds the overall guess that minimizes that utility. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax) After typing this all out, I feel like I didn't do a great job explaining, so let me know what you think.

[bmitc]

Thanks for the elaboration. I see what you mean by deterministic now. Is it also deterministic in the sense of always getting an answer within 6 guesses (maybe convergent is a better word)? (Maybe it's not possible to guarantee this. That's something I've been wondering.)

My solver is a naive one at the moment, where I've only done a little analysis to get a good starting word. From there, my solver just tracks the results from each guess and randomly selects a word that meets the constraints for the next guess. That actually works surprisingly well, and it hasn't failed Wordle yet.

I've been meaning to go back and do a more thorough analysis and create a more targeted strategy.