Wordle bulletin – Week of December 18, ‘23 (12/18-12/24) (#912-#918)
My friends,
With deep regret I announce that the daily Wordle Bulletin is on an indefinite hiatus.
I sincerely thank all of you who supported the publication.
Best wishes,
Ashok Gupta
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Wordle #916 (December 22, 2023)
NY Times WordleBot average score: 3.4
Today’s tactics: after the seed word, I needed to enter a PCon © (position confirmation)/DiscY ©(discovery) word with the twin objectives of confirming the position of the letter T and discovering additional letters. I chose COUNT. It worked – only one possible solution after the second guess.
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Wordle #915 (December 21, 2023)
NY Times WordleBot average score: 4.0
Today’s tactics: after the seed word, I needed to enter a Pcon© (position confirmation)/ DiscY© (discovery) word with the twin objectives of confirming the position of the letter T and discovering additional letters. I chose the word CLd OUT for this purpose. It narrowed the choice from 119 words to 4, one of which had already been used. I relied on a combination of usage and frequency data to select the third word. Luckily it worked.
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Wordle #914 (December 20, 2023)
NY Times WordleBot average score: 3.7
Today’s tactics: after the seed word, which was reasonably effective, I needed to enter a DiscY©(discovery) word as the second guess to discover additional vowels and consonants. Based upon frequency of letters that can follow the letter S in the first position, I chose my second guess – COLBY. It narrowed the field from 31 words to 8 words. I relied on the frequency of usage data to select the third guess. Luckily it proved to be right.
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Wordle #913 (December 19, 2023)
NY Times WordleBot average score: 3.2
Today’s tactics: after the seed word, only nine possibilities, three of which had already been used. So leaving me with only six to deal with. Relied on usage data to select the second guess and it proved to be right.
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Wordle #912 (December 18, 2023)
NY Times WordleBot average score: 4.0
Tactics for today: The seed word didn’t reveal any letters; but the effort was not all wasted since it showed that five of the very common letters are not present in the target word today. Based upon frequency data, I picked NOILY as the second guess, it eliminated all but eight possibilities, including two sets of orthographic neighbor words. The Presence of two sets of orthographic neighborhoods makes the puzzle extremely challenging. The possible words are – [BUNNY, FUNNY, PUNNY], DUNGY, [JUNKY, HUNKY, GUNKY, and FUNKY]. The usage data put FUNNY in a separate class, way above the rest of the eight. I used FUNNY as my third guess, and it worked.
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© 2023 Ashok Gupta All rights reserved.
EnotE (Eliminate not Enumerate) is copyrighted by Ashok Gupta.
PCon (Position Confirmation word) is copyrighted by Ashok Gupta.
DiscY (Discovery word) is copyrighted by Ashok Gupta.
Wordle and WordleBot are trademarks owned by the New York Times.
*The NYT Wordle players average score I refer to is as of sometime between 7:00 AM and 8:00 AM pacific coast time (USA).
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Useful facts:
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Top 11 consonants in terms of frequency of use (in any of the 5 positions): R T L S N C H P D G M
Rank order of the 6 vowels (including Y) in terms of frequency of use (in any of the 5 positions): E A O I U Y
Typical Wordle word: 2 vowels (counting Y as the sixth vowel), 1 compound (ex KN)/paired consonant (ex NN)
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Strategy:
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