Wordle Bulletin # 543 (December 14, 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.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Today’s Wordle:
Target Word: USUAL
# Of Guesses: 4.0 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: 1 vowel (A) , and 1 consonant (L), but not their exact positions.
Second Guess: The choice of the second guess depends on the learning from the seed word. Given that we only revealed one vowel and most of Wordle words contain 2 vowels, we needed to find at least one more vowel. Also, we needed to find consonants since only 1 was revealed by the seed word. I chose our “go-to” 2nd word – SONIC. It was effective in narrowing down the possibilities to just two – PSALM and USUAL.
Third Guess: I consulted the frequency charts. USUAL had a slight edge over PSALM. Also, this is what my gut feel was telling me. Luckily the strategy worked since this was the target word.
# Of Possible Solutions after the seed word: >100
# Of Possible Solutions after the 2nd word: two –USUAL, and PSALM.
# Of Possible Solutions after the 3rd word: One – the target word (USUAL)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
EnotE (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment: Didn’t need it; needed frequency data.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Final thoughts: Wordle is a game of luck and skill. Sometimes luck favors the game and some time it favors the player. Today it was my turn. One has to be lucky in life and in games like this to succeed. Thanks to luck, I was able to keep my streak of 3s (6 in a row as of today).since reverting back to the “old” strategy.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
© 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
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
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
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
