Caveat: I am not to be confused with WordleGuru.  I am an average player.  My average “#of guesses required to solve a puzzle” score is pretty similar to that of New York Times’ WordleBot.

WordleGuru Grid

Wordle #436; August 29, 2022

Overall Summary
Today’s Wordle proved to be a tough one for me, requiring 5 guesses. The WordleBot score for today’s puzzle is 3.7.  This is second day in a row that my score has been 5.  But unlike yesterday my score is way off from the WordleBot score for today.  Please see below for the hypothesis as to why my score is 5 two days in a row.

Guesses
The first guess was from my go to triad of ALERT/SONIC/PUDGY. ALERT revealed the presence of only one vowel – A and no consonants, and that too not in the correct position.  Since the odds of having a single vowel are only 1 out of 4, I needed to search for additional vowels.  I reverted to the second word in the ALERT triad, i.e., SONIC.  SONIC revealed the presence of the letters I and C, but not in the exact positions.

After the second guess, there were 8 valid answers – CHIDE, CHIEF, CHIME, DICEY, JUICE, PIECE, DEICE, and MEDIC.  My goal was to find a word that would eliminate eight of the nine. One word that came to mind is HEMPY.  I wasn’t sure if HEMPY was a valid word, so I checked and found that it is a valid Scrabble word.

I tried it and it eliminated 7 of the 9 possibilities, except for CHIEF and CHIDE. From frequency perspective CHIDE was a more probable word, especially since it ended with an E. E is the most frequent letter in the 5th position with odds of almost one out of five. But WordleGod had something else in mind by selecting CHIEF.   This is how I ended up with a score of five, once again – two days in a row.

Close look with the help of the WordleGuru Microscope
Today’s puzzle used F in the 5^th position.  The probability of F in the 5^th position is only 0.9%

The Question
The question for WordleGuru is why it ended up with scores of 5 two days in a row? What can be learned from this puzzle?  The possible culprits are as follows:

• While the first two guesses identified 3 letters, none was green.
• Too much reliance on frequency/probability data.
• Just like yesterday, when a very low frequency letter was used (Z), the same is true today.  The letter F (in CHIEF) in the fifth position has a very low frequency (0.9%).
• The elimination word entered as the third guess (HEMPY) didn’t turn out to be very effective.

Retrospective look with the help of the WordleGuru rear view mirror
The best elimination word would have been CHIDE. It would have eliminated all but one and since it was one of the possible answers there was a chance of solving the puzzle in 3 guesses.

Conclusion
Today’s exercise shows the limitation of the Eliminate-not-Enumerate (EnotE) approach. Successful deployment requires deep thinking and analytics. It may not be suitable for everyone. Even though I’m an analytical person, even for me deployment of EnotE proves to be difficult many times. Coupled with my reliance on frequencies/probabilities, I am bound to have a score of 4 or higher.  By the same token, I am almost certain to solve the puzzle before I run out of the guesses.

Lesson relearned
Look at the possible answers for an elimination word before trying to gin up a new one.
As they say you live and learn!

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