| Experimented with goal-based strategies last weekend: - least time
- fewest moves
- fewest unique letters
- etc. Most interesting to me was solving in the least time and having fixed words to maximize letter coverage, which theoretically was 25/26 letters during first five guesses. Access to such a list would make it such that the goal is given those words, can we find the answer in less than some fixed time, e.g., one minute from start to finish. Further interesting was attempting to find such a list without computer assistance, short of having access to word lists and filters, which ultimately led to a near optimal list of words for the first five moves with 24/26 letters: ** spoiler -> the (5) seed words are located at https://pastebin.com/D1DkzXA4 -- the password is gTgRCFrLYL The 'a' is notably repeated, and worse, is in the same position; was planning to run a computer search to (1) explore if a perfect solution of five dictionary words with entirely unique letters exists &/or failing (1), then (2) is there a list with 24/25 unique letters or 1-2 repeated letters s.t. all letters are in different positions. There are of course places where such a set of words with fairly maximal coverage still falls short -- a nearly so example is the word pair UNLIT and UNTIL. Determining how many such combos that might be nondeterministic with such a fixed set of starting words exist in the dictionary would be good if someone wanted to dig deeper, e.g., {ARISE, RAISE, AESIR, REAIS, SERAI} which was cited in another comment. |