Wordle Bulletin # 480 (October 12, 2022)
Target Word: IONIC
Typical Wordle Word Construct: 2 Vowels and one or more compound consonants (seen with >50% frequency)
Today’s Wordle Word Construct: A-Typical: 3 vowels (O and 2 copies of I); no compound consonant
# Of Guesses: 4.6 WordleBot average per Marc McLaren*; 4 for WordleGuru
Seed Word: SOARE
Seed Word Revelations: “O” in its correct place (2nd)
# Of Possible Solutions after the Seed Word: Too many to count!
Second Word: UNITY
Primary Objective for the 2nd word: Since most of Wordle words have 2 or more vowels, test for additional vowel(s) (among U, I, Y) and 2 high frequency consonants (in this case N and T)
Revelations from the 2nd word: Two consonants, but not their exact positions.
# Of Possible Solutions after the Second Word: Just 3 – IONIC, CONIC and LOGIN. I have a confession to make. I use a website to determine possible answers at a given point in time. To me this is like consulting a dictionary when doing crosswords. Today, this website failed me and didn’t show IONIC or CONIC as possibilities, just LOGIN. I was on “cloud 9” for an easy 3 today. Sadly, WordleGod acted fiendishly. ☹
Third Word: LOGIN
Revelations from the 3rd word: I was ready to celebrate! Only to be brought down to earth. LOGIN was not the answer. I had to use my brainpower to discover other possibilities. I found 2 – IONIC and CONIC. Now I had fallen into enumeration trap, since these two words are orthographic neighbors.
# Of Possible Solutions after the 3rd word: 2 – IONIC and CONIC (orthographic neighbors). ☹
EnotE (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment: I would have used either of IONIC or CONIC as the elimination word, instead of playing LOGIN as the third word. This would have allowed me to solve in at most 4 guesses, while preserving the option of solving in 3 guesses.
Now I was in a “pickle”. How do I decide between IONIC and CONIC! Probability of 2 I’s in a word vs 2 Cs in a word. Both are very low probability events. I “flipped a virtual coin” and decided to go with IONIC. Luckily it worked. 😊
Lesson Learned: I can’t rely on the website I have been using to determine possible solutions. I need to do a “smell” test.
Final thoughts: It was a strange day. WordleGod was not kind to me. But Lady luck was on my side and let me skate out with a score of 4. I dodged a bullet today.
© 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
