Wordle Bulletin – Wordle #444 (September 6, 2022)
Caveat: I am not to be confused with WordleGuru. I am under my guru’s tutelage.
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 #443; September 5, 2022
Overall Summary: A difficult one, due to “orthographic/substitution” neighbor words. NYT’s WordleBot score – 4.6 which attests to the difficulty. Also, Marc McLaren reported that 444x was trending on Twitter (as of 7 AM U.K. time)
Structure: Consistent with the most frequent construct (i.e., >50% frequency) – 2 vowels; 1 Compound consonant (NT). A and U are the 3rd and 4th most frequent letters in the 2nd and 3rd positions respectively.
Quality of the seed word and the second word: Effective since the seed word (ALERT) revealed two letters with one letter’s exact position (N) and the second word (COINS) revealed one letter in the correct position (N). These two words are from the triad – ALERT/COINS/PUDGY.
Impact of the first two words on the solutions space: Extremely effective since they eliminated all but 6 possible solutions (see below).
Possible Solutions: There are 6 possible solutions (tricky “orthographic/substitution” neighbor words)- DAUNT, GAUNT, HAUNT, JAUNT, VAUNT and TAUNT. My gut feel was that TAUNT will be the answer since it has duplicated Ts. The WordleGod is fiendish! But I didn’t want to take a chance and decided to implement Eliminate-not-Enumerate strategy.
Eliminate-not-Enumerate strategy: There is no 5-letter word that could take care of all six candidates. So, I had to make a priority call. Since J and V are very low frequency letters in the first position, these two can be left out of the elimination word. I settled on TIGHT as the elimination word. It did the job.
Final Thoughts: Time to thank LadyLuck once again. My gutfeel to discard JAUNT and VAUNT as the possibilities was proven right. Wordle is a game of luck and skill!
Even though I had vowed that September is going to be my gut feel month, I chickened out. My gutfeel about TAUNT as the target letter would have been right and would have given me a score of 3. Nonetheless I am satisfied with my performance.
© 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