Wordle Bulletin # 602 (February 11, 2023) –“Luck trumps skill”
Strategy
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.
My current performance vs. the goals:
I started using the current set of seed and 2nd words on 12/9/2022. My performance since then is summarized below. Due to relatively small sample size, it is too soon to draw any statistically valid conclusions.
No. of puzzles solved: 65
Average: 3.43 (aspirational target 3.5 or less) 😊
% Puzzles solved in 4 guesses or less: 95.4% (Goal >/= 95%) 😊
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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/M
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: DEBUG
# Of Guesses: 4.3 WordleBot average per Marc McLaren*, 3 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:
– Letter(s) with their position (s): NONE
– Letter(s) without their position (s): 1 (E)
Typical or atypical target word? —A-Typical
— # of Vowels: (Typical 2); 2 (E and U)
— # of Compound/paired consonants: (Typical 1); 0 compound /paired consonants
2nd word: SONIC; Even though the seed word revealed only 1 vowel, I decided to stay with my “go-to” 2nd word -SONIC. This is based on learnings from the recent past. There is built in variability in Wordle, changing the 2nd word adds one more layer of variability. I can’t prove that my assertion is valid, but intuitively it makes sense to me. Today SONIC didn’t reveal any additional letter, still it communicated important information. At this stage there were 12 possibilities, including 5 that are not frequently used words.
3rd Word: It was time to deploy the EnotE strategy. I could not come up with the ideal elimination word that would eliminate all but 1 possibilities. So, I had to look for the second best. I used one of the possible words as the elimination word – DEBUG. I was pleasantly surprised to see all green squares lit up! It is another example of the validity of my approach that picking one of the possibilities is preferrable, since it gives a possibility to scoring all green, like what happened today.
# Of Possible Solutions after the 1st word: Too many
# Of Possible Solutions after the 2nd word: 12 (5 less frequently used words – in my judgement)
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EnotE© (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment: Used at the 3rd word stage. It did a superb job – in confirming that the word itself was the target word. 😊😊😊😊😊
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Final thoughts: Wordle is a game of luck and skill. Sometimes luck favors the game and sometimes it favors the player. Luck was in my corner today in full glory!
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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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© 2023 Ashok Gupta All rights reserved.
EnotE (Eliminate not Enumerate) is copyrighted by Ashok Gupta
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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