Wordle Bulletin # 547 (December 18, 2022)
My strategy is built to ensure I solve 95% of the puzzles in 4 guesses or less. It is not built to always shoot for the lowest score possible. The score depends a lot on the seed word. Wordle is a game of luck and skill. My goal is to score an average solve rate of 4 guesses. My aspirational goal is 3.5 average and <5% 5/6 guesses.
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Statistical Facts:
Typical Wordle Word Construct: 2 Vowels and one compound consonant (example KN or TCH)/paired consonant (example PP) ; seen with >50% frequency
10 Most frequent consonants (in declining order): R, T, L, S, N, C, H, P, D, and G
6 Vowels (in declining order): E, A, O, I, U, Y
10 Most frequent letters (in declining order): E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, N, and C
Frequency of the 5 vowels in the five positions: 15%, 49%, 54%, 35% and 24% respectively.
Position of the letter “Y”: About 80% of all the “Ys” in Wordle are found in the 5th position.
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Today’s Wordle:
Target Word: TAPER
# Of Guesses: 3.9 WordleBot average per Marc McLaren*; 4 for WordleGuru
Seed Word: ALERT (Top 3 consonants and top 2 vowels) – No change – this is my go-to Seed word.
What we learned from the Seed Word: the presence of A, E, R and T, but not their positions. At this point I felt the highest of the highs, thinking of a 2!
Second Guess: The choice of the second guess depends on the learning from the seed word. Given that we revealed 2 consonants and 2 vowels, I didn’t use SONIC as the 2nd word. After the seed word, there were 17 possible answers, and the letter N was not present in any of the 17 possibilities. Therefore, I chose CRATE hoping that I’d learn the position of at least one of the 4 letters revealed by the seed word. To my utter disappointment, I didn’t learn of the exact positions of any of the 4 letters, and at the same I learned the absence of C. Further, the second word eliminated only a few of the 17 possible answers. I fell from feeling the highest of the highs to the lowest of the lows.
Third Guess: the role of the 3rd guess was to be an elimination word. It took quite a bit of time to decide on one. Still the word I chose, WHOMP, could not have eliminated all but 1 possibilities. Mentally I was ready for a disaster, possible 6 or more. One reason was the presence of orthographic neighbor words as possibilities – TAPER, TASER, TAKER, and TAMER. Luckily for me WHOMP did its job and led me to the target word of TAPER.
# Of Possible Solutions after the seed word: 17
# Of Possible Solutions after the 2nd word: ~ 14
# Of Possible Solutions after the 3rd word: 1
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EnotE (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment: worked successfully.
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Final thoughts: Wordle is a game of luck and skill. Sometimes luck favors the game and some time it favors the player. Today I felt that both the game and I were lucky. As I stated earlier, I felt the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows. I was mentally prepared to go up to the score of 6, or even worse not being able to solve in 6 guesses. ☹ I felt as happy getting out in 4 as I’d have with a score of 2. It is all relative to expectations, isn’t it!
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My other work you may find interesting
I write Rhyming Prose (Prose that rhymes). My work in this area can be found on my website, Rhyming Prose — … when a poem won’t do it!
I have also started writing free-verse poems, haikus and songs. My work in this area can be found on my website, Budding Poets Corner – Poet Laureates of Tomorrow
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© 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
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