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Wordle Bulletin – Wordle #455 (September 17, 2022)

Preamble: My goal is to solve Wordle puzzles in 3.5 guesses on an average.   Currently I am running at 3.73, just slightly better than the overall average (4.1) as reported by New York Times’ WordleBot*.  A research paper by two MIT professors** claims that the lowest number of guesses to win are 3.42117 (using SALET as the seed word). In light of this, my aspirational goal of 3.5 is not unrealistic.


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Wordle #455; September 17, 2022

 

Overall Summary: The average score on the NYT’s WordleBot is 3.5 per Marc McLaren*.  In terms of difficulty, it’s in the middle, per my judgement. Using the golf parlance, more people are scoring birdies than par.

Structure: It has two vowels (U and E) and one compound consonant (CH). Thus it is a typical Wordle word.

Quality and the impact of the 1st and 2nd words:  I I tried a new seed word today – SALET. This word is the best seed word according to a research paper published by 2 professors at MIT.**  It revealed two letters (one vowel and one consonant), but not their positions. It is soon to tell how effective this new triad will be for me.

I needed to find a second vowel. I used the second word of this triad – RHINO. After these two words I had three possible solutions CHUTE, THEME and THYME. Vaguely I remember that THYME had already been used, but I wasn’t 100% sure.

My gut feel was telling me the answer is CHUTE.  But, after yesterday’s beating and thrashing I didn’t want to take a chance of falling into the enumeration hell. So, I decided to employ the EnotE strategy, as described below.

Eliminate-not-Enumerate (EnotE) strategy: I used the 3rd word of the triad – PUDGY as the elimination word. It pointed to the answer which is CHUTE.

Final Thoughts: Even though I promised to go by my gut feel for the month of September, after yesterday’s mauling, I chose a less risky path of EnotE.  Once burned, twice shy.

© 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

** An Exact and Interpretable Solution to Wordle by Dimitris Bertsimas (MIT professor) and Alex Paskov (MIT Operations Research Center staff)


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