Wordle Bulletin # 464 (September 26, 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: BRISK:
Typical Wordle Word Construct: 2 Vowels and one or more compound consonants (seen with >50% frequency):
Today’s Wordle Word Construct: Atypical; 1 vowel (I) and 2 compound consonants (BR and SK):
Difficulty: “Today’s Wordle answer is a bit of a tricky beast, but is still doable with some guesses to spare.” per Marc McLaren*; “Nothing out of the ordinary” per WordleGuru:
# Of Guesses: 4.1 per Marc McLaren*; 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): SOARE (SOARE/CULTY/NYMPH) **:
Seed Word Revelations: 2 consonants (S and R), but not their exact positions:
# Of Possible Solutions After the Seed Word: >25
Second Word: UNITY (decided to not use the second word of the triad, since the seed word didn’t reveal the presence of any vowel and majority of the Wordle words contain 2 or 3 vowels)
Objectives for the 2nd word: Reveal the presence of two high frequency consonants – N and T. and 3 vowels – U, I and Y.
Revelations from the 2nd word: Presence of 1 vowel (I) in the 3rd position; no new consonants
# Of Possible Solutions After the 2nd Word: Five – CRISP, PRISM, BRISK, FRISK, and IRISH. I don’t know the rules of Wordle as far as ethnic/nationality names (such as IRISH)are concerned. My gutfeel told me that IRISH is unlikely to be the answer. Frequency data confirmed this. IRISH had the lowest frequency. This reduced the possible answers to just 4.
3rd word: It was time to deploy the EnotE strategy. I could not come up with an elimination word that would include IRISH in the elimination game. Conveniently I had already discarded IRISH as a possible word. So, I had to find a word to eliminate 3 of the 4 possibilities. The word I chose is BLIMP.
Objectives for the 3rd word: Eliminate 3 of the 4 possibilities among CRISP, PRISM, BRISK, and FRISK. It did! Pointed to BRISK as the answer.
EnotE (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment: See above.
:
Hindsight: None.
Lesson Learned /Relearned: Frequency distribution data is valuable and insightful.
Gut feel : IRISH is not the target word.
Final thoughts: Wordle is a game of luck and skill. Only one of the two doesn’t work. Luckily for me, frequency distribution data helped.
Golf Speak: “Par” for me. Mostly “pars” (4 guesses) with a few “birdies” (3 guesses) thrown in 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
