Wordle Bulletin # 461 (September 23, 2022)
Prolog: The strategy I employ is designed to ensure I solve the puzzle for sure, preferably in 5 guesses or less. This strategy will rarely solve the puzzle in 3 guesses or less.
Target Word: GLORY
Typical Wordle Word Construct: 2 Vowels and one or more compound consonants (seen with >50% frequency)
Today’s Wordle Word Construct: Typical; 2 vowels (including Y) and 1 compound consonant (GL)
Difficulty: “Today’s Wordle answer is another easy one.” per Marc McLaren*; “Nothing out of the ordinary” per WordleGuru
# Of Guesses:3.8 per New York Times’ WordleBot*; 4 for WordleGuru 😊
Average Guesses introduction-to-date for the WordleBot* community: 4.1
Average Guesses Jan ’22-to-date for WordleGuru: 3.75 (aspirational goal is 3.5)
Seed Word & the triad (all 3 words in a triad have non-overlapping and high frequency letters): SALET (SALET/RHINO/PUDGY)**
Seed Word Revelations: 1 letter (L) but not its position
# Of Possible Solutions After the Seed Word:>25
Second Word: RHINO (2nd word in the triad)
Objectives for the 2nd word: Reveal vowels (I and O) and high frequency consonants R, H and N
Revelations from the 2nd word: R and O but not their positions
# Of Possible Solutions After the 2nd Word: Eight – DROOL, DROLL, FLOUR, FLOOR, GLORY, GROWL, PROWL and WORLD
3rd word: PUDGY
Objectives for the 3rd word: Reveal at least one more vowel (U or Y), since most Wordle words have 2 or more vowels. Also, since 2 of the possible 8 words have either U or Y, we needed to determine if either of these vowels was part of the target word.
Further, since the 2nd word had narrowed the possible words universe to just 8 words, we could think of employing the EnotE strategy.
The best of all worlds would be if we could identify one word that would serve both objectives. A most pleasantly surprising thing is that the third word of the triad (PUDGY) would serve both objectives. 🙂
EnotE (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment: As stated above, we were given an opportunity to deploy the EnotE strategy. PUDGY was able to eliminate 7 of the 8 words, thereby confirming the target word – GLORY.
Hindsight: None
Lesson Learned /Relearned: Stay with the triad. A triad can only be effective, if used repeatedly since the outcome is probability based. Also, the law of large number applies.
Gut feel answer: None
Final thoughts: The triad (SALET/RHINO/PUDGY) is a powerful 1-2-3 punch!
Golf Speak: “Par” for me.; More “pars” (4 guesses) than “birdies” (3 guesses) for the WordleBot community.
© 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
** SALET is the recommended seed word by two MIT professors. Their paper is published as “An Exact and Interpretable Solution to Wordle by Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT professor) and Alex Paskov (MIT Operations Research Center staff)”. The triad of SALET/RHINO/PUDGY is the creation of WordleGuru.
