Wordle Bulletin – Wordle #451 (September 13, 2022)
Preamble: My goal is to solve Wordle puzzles in 3.5 guesses on an average. Currently I am running at 3.73, just slightly better than the overall average (4.1) as reported by New York Times’ WordleBot*.
WordleGuru Grid
Wordle #451; September 13, 2022
Overall Summary: Today’s Wordle is in the middle of the pack difficulty wise, per my judgement. The NYT’s WordleBot average is 4.3 compared to the average for all the Wordles program to date (4.1), per Marc McLaren*. My score today was once again “par” (using the golf metaphor; a typical 18-hole golf course is a par-72 golf course, meaning average for the 18 holes is par-4). Average score of 4.3 indicates that more players are making “bogeys” than “birdies”!
The target word is not a “rare” word, and it is “grudgingly” following the common characteristics, as discussed below. This may be the reason why some players are having difficulty.
Structure: Today’s target word is “grudgingly” following the most common characteristics of Wordle words. It has two vowels (though the same vowel repeated). It has “compound consonants” except that it has three consonants next to each other (LPH) instead of the usual two. The frequency of such construct is about 6%.
Quality and the impact of the seed word: My first guess (ALERT) was quite helpful. It revealed the first two letters in exact positions (A and L). At this point in time, I had 11 possible answers. These are ALBUM, ALIAS, ALIBI, ALIGN, ALLAY, ALLOY, ALOHA, ALONG, ALOOF, ALOUD and ALPHA.
Eliminate-not-Enumerate strategy: Instead of entering the companion word for ALERT (COINS), I decided to deploy EnotE strategy with my second guess. I wanted to pick a word that would eliminate most of the 11 possibilities, but I could not come up with one. So, the next best goal was to find a word that would eliminate most of the 11 possibilities. I decided to go with BUOYS. Even though it didn’t reveal any additional letter, it eliminated 9 of the 11 possibilities! Pretty good some would say. I say not so fast. The two possibilities left for me to deal with were ALPHA and ALIGN.
I decided to use a frequency table to decide between these two words. I liked the chances of ALIGN as the target word for two reasons – 1) the letter I in the 3rd position is the 3rd most frequent letter whereas P in the 3rd position is in the middle of the ranking and 2) the letter N is twice as frequent in the fifth position as the letter A. That’s not what the WordleGod had in mind. The LadyLuck was not smiling today.
Hindsight: Looking back, I made a mistake. I failed to notice that ALPHA has three consonants in a row (LPH). I did notice that both ALIGN, and ALPHA have compound consonants (GN and PH respectively). Had I noticed the presence of 3 consonants in a row, I’d have picked ALPHA as the third guess.
Final Thoughts: I’m not very happy with my performance today since I made a mental error. Another learning. Live and Learn.
© 2022 Ashok Gupta All rights reserved.
Wordle and WordleBot are trademarks owned by the New York Times.
*The WordleBot score I refer to comes from Tom’s Guide by Marc McLaren. Marc writes his post at around 7 AM U.K. time.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/what-is-todays-wordle-answer#section-previous-wordle-answers
