Wordle Bulletin #630 (March 11, 2023) — “my aha moment!”
Today’s Wordle:
Target Word: EMAIL
# Of Guesses: 3.5 WordleBot average per Marc McLaren*, 3 for WordleGuru 😊
Typical or atypical target word? — Atypical, it contains 3 vowels (A, E, I) and no compound consonant. The “norm” is 2 vowels and 1 compound/paired consonant.
Seed Word: STARE – The “go-to” seed word starting March 8, 2023.
What we learned from the Seed Word: The seed word revealed 2 letters – A (in 3rd position) and E (but not its position). Too many possibilities at this stage. Need more discovery.
2nd word: LUNCH (decided to not use the 2nd word of the triad STARE/CHOIL/PUDGY): Used LUNCH instead since 2 vowels were revealed by the seed word. Please read more on the reason for this switch (my Aha moment) after the Final Thoughts section.
The choice of LUNCH allowed me to test for 4 high frequency consonants. It revealed L but not its position. Two possibilities at this stage – MEALY, and EMAIL. I discounted MEALY, since I didn’t think it is commonly used. This left me with the target word, i.e., EMAIL.
Final Thoughts: Wordle is a game of luck and skill. Sometimes luck favors the game and sometimes it favors the player. Today luck was in neutral.
Aha Moment: had I stayed with the go-to 2nd word (CHOIL), instead of switching to LUNCH, I’d have made my life easier. MEALY would not have been identified as a possible solution. In this case I’d have had the letters “AIL” in green (3-5 positions) and E in either 1st or 2nd position.
I had noticed this phenomenon before also quite a few times. Until today, I had not tried to reason why, but today I did. Since it kept happening over and over, it couldn’t be just random.
I used to look at frequency data as two independent sets – one for the vowels and one for the consonants. As an example, today the seed word revealed A and E. Since most of the words have only two vowels, I decided to leave out O and I from the 2nd word and use U to make a word using 4 high frequency consonants (LNCH). This allowed me to test for N also, in addition to LCH. This made perfect sense, until I reflected upon it.
What I had done was I dropped two high frequency letters (looking at vowels and consonants as one set) and replaced them with lower frequency letters. The top twelve letters (vowels and consonants as one set, frequency wise) are as follows:
E, A, R, O, T, L, I, S, N, C, U, H (Vowels only: E, A, O, I, U; Consonants only: R, T, L, S, N, C, H)
By dropping O and I, I left out 4th and 7th most frequent letters and inserted N and U, which are 9th and 11th most frequent letters. Not the most optimal use of the frequency data. This made perfect sense, if I looked at the vowels and Consonants as two independent sets.
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
My strategy, statistical facts and 3-word triads can be found by clicking on the following URL:
© 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
