Wordle Bulletin – Wordle #453 (September 15, 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.
WordleGuru Grid
Wordle #453; September 15, 2022
Overall Summary: I found today’s Wordle to be close to the “middle of the road” in terms of difficulty. The NYT’s WordleBot average is 3.7 which is quite a lot better than the average for all the Wordles thus far (4.1), per Marc McLaren*. More people are scoring birdies than bogeys since par for the course is 4.
My score today (4) was a “par” (using the golf metaphor; a typical 18-hole golf course is a par-72 golf course, meaning average for the 18 holes is par-4).
Structure: It has two vowels (O and U) and one compound consonant (BT). The letter T is the 2nd most frequent letter in the 5th position. The letter O is the most frequent letter in the 2nd position and U is the 4th most frequent letter in the 3rd position
Quality and the impact of the 1st and 2nd words: I started with my go-to-seed word – ALERT. It revealed only one letter (T). At this stage there were more than 50 possible solutions. So, I needed to find a second word that would reveal one or two vowels among I, O, U, and possibly Y.
I decided to not use COINS as the second word since among 50 plus possible solutions there were very few containing the letter C. I decided to go with PIOUS instead. It revealed two vowels – O and U, but not their positions. But it managed to reduce the possible words to a small number (5)- COUNT, MOUNT, FOUNT, DOUBT and OUGHT. Since FOUNT is not a common word so essentially the target word had to be one of the four remaining words.
Eliminate-not-Enumerate (EnotE) strategy: Now was the time to deploy the EnotE strategy. I thought the answer will be either COUNT or MOUNT. Either one of these two would serve as an elimination word. I chose to go with MOUNT. Disappointingly, it was not the answer, but it led to the answer – DOUBT.
Final Thoughts: I am a bit disappointed with my score today. My seed word was not as effective today. My expectation of the seed word is that it will reveal at least two letters. But probabilistic systems don’t work that way. So, I have to accept my score of “par” and hope for a better tomorrow. As I remind myself, Wordle is a game of luck and skill. One without the other is not sufficient.
© 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)