BS: Wordle

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 11 Apr 22 - 05:15 PM

I was skunked again today. Too many choices in the one letter I had to swap out.

Wordle 296 X/6

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 11 Apr 22 - 06:06 PM

Four. It took me a lot longer than usual to unfurrow my puzzled brow.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jeri
Date: 11 Apr 22 - 06:25 PM

Three.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 12 Apr 22 - 09:25 AM

Three.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Apr 22 - 10:26 AM

Five. A duff start and a silly guess.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 13 Apr 22 - 11:21 PM

Wordle 298 4/6

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: robomatic
Date: 14 Apr 22 - 05:06 PM

Archive version was shut down yesterday. According to the site creator, per the request of the New York Times.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 14 Apr 22 - 05:28 PM

Four.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jeri
Date: 14 Apr 22 - 05:48 PM

Five today. Bah!

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Raedwulf
Date: 15 Apr 22 - 01:04 PM

I resisted joining in initially, when invited to do so. Now... Wordle, Dordle, Quordle, Octordle (1, 2, 4, 8). Tried Sectordle a couple of times, but found it a waste of time. With 16 words, they more or less solve themselves once you get the first one, so it's just a question of how quickly you get your first word.

On Wordle, I'm up to 70 games now. I play hard mode (must use any known letters) and I don't cheat by recording words that have already been used, so I can't eliminate possible words. The median i.e. most common score seems to be 4 (from 2 attempts, 5, 23, 28, 13, 1 is my current record), my average currently a shade under 3.75. I haven't had a 1 yet, though I had one today on Dordle, having had one previously on Quordle.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Raedwulf
Date: 15 Apr 22 - 02:23 PM

Words with three vowels are a good starting point...

Actually, I disagree with this. If you like this as an opening tactic, then start with either ARISE or RAISE. They're the 3 most common vowels; O is less so, U not even in the top 10 letters. But many 5 letter words contain no more than one vowel (BITCH/DITCH/WITCH); some none at all (SLYLY). A better starting strategy is 4 consonants. TREND is good, as is STERN.

On a dictionary sort, (depending on your dictionary; what follows was done on the 1995 Concise OED), the top 10 letters are E, S, I, A, R, N, M, T, O , D; the 10 most common initial letters are P, H, C, B, D, R, M, T, A, F. A textual sort is no good because it's biased by common words like THE, WHERE, etc. Frex, W is the 6th most common initial letter, but only the 22nd most common otherwise. Remember Kipling's "Six honest serving men"!

But also remember! Well, two things actually... First, those frequencies are based on full dictionaries, not dictionaries of 5 letter words. Prefixes & suffixes will affect the order. How many 5 letter words start pre- or anti-? ;-) It's not perfect, but the best guide you're likely to get. When it comes down to it, Wordle runs off a limited subset of 5 letter words; if memory serves its (fixed) list is some 2,500 out of some 13K in total.

Second, when it comes down to it, just like the lottery, any given letter (number) is just as likely to appear in any given random moment. What I mean is this: If the lottery has drawn the 1 ball 5 weeks in a row, it doesn't mean that it won't appear this week. It still has a 1 in 49 (or whatever the probability is) of appearing. If you get S***E on Wordle, SLOPE or SCORE aren't more likely to be the word of the day, but they're more likely to give you a clue than SMOKE if they're not. When you get to SHA*E... There's 7 possible words there. SHARE & SHADE are no more likely than SHAVE or SHAKE!

And also, apart from the US word list (which reduces the frequency of U even further, because ARMOR / FAVOR etc can appear...), I have never seen a plural. BONUS is valid, NOTED was my 1 on Dordle today, but whilst STONE will be in the Wordle list, I don't expect to ever see NOTES...

Hope this is of some help to you hopeless addicts. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! ;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Apr 22 - 05:49 PM

Five. By line 3 I had four greens, but then I had four possible fits for the remaining letter. Bad guessing could have had me failing. So for line 4 I made up a word containing three of the four possibles. I couldn't have used all four because no word in the world contained all of them. By doing this I was guaranteed to not fail and guaranteed to get the answer on line 5. Yeah?

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 15 Apr 22 - 10:14 PM

I will have to argue in favor of Y being a vowel. Of course it is.

I do a mix of words with a lot of vowels such as aisle, audio (suggested by someone here) or adieu, or a combination of popular vowels and consonants (earth, throe, frump) and only occasionally a word like quota or quart.

Wordle 300 6/6

The bottom three rows of my diagram today are testing one letter to get the right word.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 16 Apr 22 - 04:02 AM

Wordle 301 3/6

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Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Apr 22 - 09:56 AM

Four. Uncannily, Mrs Steve, who did it in three, had her three lines identical to my last three. I was unluckier than her in picking a duff first word, that's all.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jeri
Date: 16 Apr 22 - 01:38 PM

Four today. If I'd picked the right word, it could have been three. (Of course, this is every day: "I COULD have...".

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Apr 22 - 07:58 PM

Roger that. :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 16 Apr 22 - 09:56 PM

If I'd picked the right word, it could have been one.

DC

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 04:38 AM

I never want to do it in one. That would be 100% good luck and nil percent skill.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 05:17 AM

Five. I'm having a very humdrum run. Yet to fail, however!

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jeri
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 09:50 AM

I got it in one once, because someone gave a hint, and I figured it out. It took the fun out of it.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 09:59 AM

Jon, you're showing off! I can copy that, but you didn't have a yellow box. I'll have to figure that one out myself. :)

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 01:21 PM

Wordle 302 4/6

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I just used this HTML encoder

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 02:32 PM

Wordle 302 4/6

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Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: robomatic
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 02:36 PM

I have a hard time understanding how you can use the 'hard' method in which you must include all 'found' letters in your next guess. Won't a word with many possible letters cause you to run out of chances?

For instance, in yesterday's effort, I had to come up with a word that included alternative letters so as to eliminate possibilities, at the same time as testing if one of the letters was used more than once.

Hope this makes sense without giving anything away.
Yesterday, 5.
Today, 4.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stanron
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 03:10 PM

Wordle 302 4/6

??????
???????
????????
??????????

There's a load of HTML encoders out there if you search for them. This one is

https://www.convertstring.com/EncodeDecode/HtmlEncode

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stanron
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 03:11 PM

OOPS it worked in preview. Oh well...

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 03:36 PM

My two/ten/twenty/ thirty minutes a day on the Wordle is absolutely sacrosanct for me. I will not brook hints, clues, tips or loose Wordle chitchat while I'm doing it. It's either all my own work or I can't cope. In the words of the song, for that few minutes, make the world go away, get it off my shoulders... (Thanks to Jim Reeves for that, for the benefit of people who are far too young...)

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 17 Apr 22 - 03:52 PM

Stanron, there are quite a few encoders around but I tried a couple before finding one (the one I linked to) that worked as I wanted. Output should be along these lines:

Wordle 302 4/6

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Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 18 Apr 22 - 04:43 AM

70 games so far with 93% success. I Always start with SEPIA ( or MEDIA) and COURT. All vowels used and likely letters.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 18 Apr 22 - 06:06 AM

Three today. Better, but not as good as Mrs Steve with her two. Tsk.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stanron
Date: 18 Apr 22 - 06:58 AM

Okay Jon I'll try this

Wordle 303 2/6

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Pure luck getting it in two.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 18 Apr 22 - 07:08 AM

Wordle 303 3/6

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Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stanron
Date: 18 Apr 22 - 07:59 AM

Guess who's learned how to lie with HTML.


Wordle 303 1/6

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I won't be posting these again.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 18 Apr 22 - 12:40 PM

It was a good day today - especially since my first guess had so many of the letters. The trick is to ignore the letters that didn't work the first time, hence the pencil and paper aspect of the game.

Wordle 303 2/6

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Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 18 Apr 22 - 12:53 PM

I don't think there's really a winning first-word formula. I set a very low bar: two vowels, no repeat letters and no x, j, q or z. I pick up the nearest mag and choose the first likely-looking five-letter word I see.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: gillymor
Date: 18 Apr 22 - 01:50 PM

I do better when I burn up lots of consonants early so I often start with one vowel words like SPEND and PLANT. I haven't been tracking my results it just seems easier to me.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 19 Apr 22 - 05:14 AM

FAIL! Not only me, both of us. I had way too many options by lines 3/4 and kept choosing ones that did nothing to further my progress. I had too many consonants to play with. So in future I'm dropping the obsession with finding the right vowels. Elimination of consonants will be the name of the game!

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stanron
Date: 19 Apr 22 - 06:51 AM

I had three greens on lines 2 to 5 and finally got it on the last try. There's always going to be an element of luck and no one system can swing it one way or the other. My longest streak is 26 and I've just equaled it again today.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Raedwulf
Date: 19 Apr 22 - 11:36 AM

Elimination of consonants will be the name of the game!

*shrug* I did point this out to folks. Also, P is not a particularly good letter for a first line; rather than PLANT, try SCANT or SLANT, if you are so inclined. P is about 15th most common; C & L are both more frequent.

However, also bear in mind that letter frequency becomes less useful as uncertainty decreases. The perfect example of this is from a few days ago, when I got SHA*E (IIRC, it was SHAME). There are 6 possible letters to fill P4 (although to get to SHA*E, you must have eliminated at least one of those, of course!). At this point, letter frequency means nothing; all of the words are valid, all equally likely. Presuming they're in the limited (2315 out of @12K 5 letter words by US spelling) dikker.

This is where Wordle fails for me, because it becomes a straight guessing game, no skill involved (vice Steve's remark about a 1/6 being pure luck). No matter that R is around 7.3 times more likely to appear in words than V, when it comes down to a single letter, SHAVE has just as much chance (1 in 5, presumably!) to be the word as SHARE.

If I run into one of those situations where I have more possible words than remaining guesses, I generally quit at L5. I had exactly this today. Unfortunately for me, I got P2, P4 & P5 on L3. By getting P1&3 wrong, I eliminated more than two other possible words, but it still left...

Well, on L4, I used a particular letter in P3 for which there are at least 9 possible P1s (5 had already been removed). Both letters were wrong, which reduced the pool of available words by another 5 or 6, since there were options for P1 at P3. That still left at least 3 possible words, using SIX different letters with no way of logically reducing them. I took one further guess on L5, it was wrong, I quit. I don't play Wordle when it's nothing but a guessing game.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 19 Apr 22 - 12:10 PM

I had a great set of letters but the tyranny of too many to choose from resulted in getting skunked. I wonder if the designers of this game put odds on how many will win or fail with each contest?

Wordle 304 X/6

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Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jeri
Date: 19 Apr 22 - 04:31 PM

I had the same thing happen, and the letters I figured out were the same as yours. A lot of people had a problem today.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 19 Apr 22 - 04:41 PM

"Great minds think alike!"

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 20 Apr 22 - 02:55 AM

Wordle 305 4/6

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I did yesterday's (#304) in 4. I think I was lucky. I had the pattern needing 2 consonants on line 3 and the one word I saw at the time to try on line 4 happened to be the right one. As I think others found out, there were quite a few possibilities from my position in line 3.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 20 Apr 22 - 04:44 AM

If there are too many options by line three, I'm going to be considering the Jon Freeman strategy in future. Guessing when there were far too many possibilities was the death of me yesterday. I feel punctured. Whether the strategy can be used effectively when more than one remaining letter is involved is a moot point...

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 20 Apr 22 - 09:56 AM

Four. Back on the rails.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 20 Apr 22 - 11:26 AM

I am stumped at line four. There doesn't appear to be a word in the English language with the four letters I have in front of me in the order they can appear (no luck adding a fifth so far).

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jeri
Date: 20 Apr 22 - 04:50 PM

Me too, in four. After yesterday, it feels good.

Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 20 Apr 22 - 05:08 PM

I had to throw out a sacrifice word just to see about letter placement and got it on six. "Whew!" is right! I left for a while and finished it a couple of hours later.

Wordle 305 6/6

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Subject: RE: BS: Wordle
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 21 Apr 22 - 03:57 AM

Another 4 for me today. 4 is by far my most common score.

Wordle 306 4/6

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