[phkahler]

Agreed, but in this case I don't see it as optimal. In the last example he's found 4 of the 5 letters after 2 guesses. Using 3 more guesses at that point seems like a bad idea. At some point finding words that shuffle known letters around to unscramble them might be better. There are also words like ROBOT that have duplicate letters - that was the wordle of the day recently.

For a nice do-it-by-hand puzzle try this:

Fill a 4x4 grid with whole numbers less than 30, such that all rows have the same product (of all 4 numbers) and all columns have the same sum (of all 4 numbers). This can be done by hand with some paper - I kept notes in notepad to do it.

[mturmon]

Yes, the word optimal should be understood very narrowly here.

Part of the fun (and in game-nerdery terms, the “optimality”) is getting there before 6 guesses, which would require some adaptive strategy.