[ledauphin]

I did some work on this as well.

One thing I think this analysis seems to be missing is taking into account letter position within the word set. If you take that into account, it actually shifts the first guesses, since you're far better off to discover a green square than a yellow one.

There are some pretty weird words that pop up if you do this analysis, so I've settled on some that are slightly suboptimal but won't make me feel like a robot every day.

I will say that "cares", in my analysis, is a significantly better option than the author's suggestion of aeros, because "e" is more common in position 4 than in 2, and a is much more common in position 2 than 1.

[ncmncm]

I bet "s" in final position is much rarer than in typical text, because Wardle seems (reasonably!) to prefer base words over plurals, as well as past tense, participle, and other modifications.

For me the most useful immediate information is about vowels, making "adieu" quite useful. But "irate" and "inter" are also pretty good.

Most people focus on the yellow and green results, but the grey results can be even more informative. A grey result doesn't just tell you about its own position, but about all five. So each grey result from the first guess rules out huge swaths of the dictionary.

The more letters from ETAOIN SHRDLU you can cram into the first two guesses, the better off you are. Thus, any letters in color on the first guess would be wasted if repeated in the second word.

[ledauphin]

We all draw our lines somewhere different, of course, but to my mind, taking into account Wardle's specific choices as exposed in the source code feels like cheating, vs taking the full list of 5 letter words that his code "accepts".

Knowing what answers are actually "true" ahead of time is more information than I'm comfortable taking advantage of.

And yes, eliminating letters is crucial - in my opinion it's always better to guess 5 totally new letters for the second word.

[ncmncm]

I don't know anything about the source code, so cannot be drawing conclusions from it. Preferring non-inflected words is just good policy, for somebody running such a game.