Wordle Bulletin – Wordle #438 (August 31, 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 #438; August 31, 2022
Overall Summary
I performed rather poorly today. Honestly, embarrassing poorly. Just look at the last three guesses! I rail against “enumeration”, but that’s what I ended up doing today. Sad!
I got swayed by the fact that since Z was used very recently (August 28th, 3 days ago) in GAUZE, the WordleGod would be reluctant to use it again. The WordleGod must have been in a surly mood! This affected my fourth guess and then I got into the “enumeration” hell.
The NYT’s WordleBot reported a score of 4.8 and “Wordle #438” was trending on Twitter (as of the morning hours), per Marc McLaren (as of about 7AM UK time)
1st and 2nd Guesses
The first guess was from my go to triad of ALERT/SONIC/PUDGY. ALERT revealed the presence of one vowel – E (not in the exact position) and one consonant – R (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 only one letter I, but not in the exact position.
I thought of all the possible solutions after the second guess. The letters R, E and I are very common. In fact, from the frequency perspective E, R and I are 1st, 3rd and 7th most frequently found letters (in any of the five positions). There must have been more than 40 or 50 possibilities.
3rd Guess
I had dual objective with my third guess – learn more about the exact positions of E, I and R and confirm/eliminate two consonants. I could not think of a 5-letter word with 4 consonants (excluding L, T, S, N, and C) and one vowel. I was pretty sure that there is no U or Y in the target word. Still, I could have used U and/or Y in creating an elimination word.
PUDGY was one possibility (no overlap with consonants in ALERT and SONIC). GLYPH (or LYMPH) is another possibility, although it contains L, which we know is not in the target word. PSYCH is another option, again with only 3 unknown consonants. I didn’t give much consideration to PUDGY (mistake).
I chose BRIEF instead. Though it confirmed the positions of R and I, but not that of E. It moved the ball forward ever so slightly. I was pretty confident at this stage to say E was in the 5th position. E is the most frequent letter in the 5th position and 37% of the time it is found in the 5th position, compared to 5% of the time in the 1st position.
Findings with BRIEF as the 3rd guess
After the third guess (BRIEF), I had 6 possibilities – PRIME, PRIDE, PRIZE, GRIPE, GRIME, and DRIVE. So close yet so far. I was 100% sure at this stage that the target word is one of PRIME, PRIDE or PRIZE. This construct where words have 4 common letters, and only vary in one letter, is one of the favorite constructs of the WordleGod. If the WordleGod really wanted to be devilish, he/she would have set the target word as GRIPE or GRIME. When words differ in only letter, these are called “orthographic neighbor”, or “substitution neighbor”.
BRIEF helped a bit but left me with a “mess” to deal with. I should have tried PUDGY, the tried and true third member of the triad. With BRIEF as the 3rd guess, using the “enumerate” strategy, the apriori chances of solving the puzzle are 1 out of 6 in 4/5/6 guesses and 3 out of 6 of not solving.
Findings with PUDGY as the 3rd guess
PUDGY would have worked better as the 3rd guess. Consider the following.
Let’s first look at P
- P black – no P – eliminate PRIME, PRIDE, PRIZE, and GRIPE, leaving us with GRIME and DRIVE
- P yellow – eliminate PRIME, PRIDE and PRIZE, leaving GRIPE as the answer
- P green – eliminate GRIPE, leaving us with PRIME, PRIDE and PRIZE as the possibilities
Let’s now look at D (only under 1P and 3P)
- D black – no D
- 1P: eliminate DRIVE leaving us with the answer GRIPE
- 3P: Eliminate PRIDE leaving us with PRIME and PRIZE to deal with
- D yellow
- 1P: eliminate GRIME leaving us with DRIVE as the answer
- 3P: Eliminate PRIME and PRIZE, leaving us with PRIDE as the answer
- D green – not possible
Now let’s look at G (4th letter in PUDGY): doesn’t help in resolving between PRIME and PRIZE (1D/3P).
PUDGY had 2 out of 6 odds of not identifying the target word in 4 guesses, but 4 out of 6 odds in solving the puzzle in 4 or 5 guesses. There are no chances of not solving the puzzle. In that sense PUDGY would have been a better option than BRIEF as the third guess.
A better exercise would have been to think of the possibility of “orthographic neighbors” given three letters, i.e. I, E and R after the second guess. This would not have been a very difficult exercise. If such a possibility is discovered, it would be a good bet that the target word would be from the list of “orthographic neighbors”. Still there may be a situation (as in this Wordle) that there are 2 sets of “orthographic neighbors”. You know well, the WordleGod acts fiendishly!
Hindsight
My choice of the third word BRIEF wasn’t the right one. My gut feels tells me since I already knew that R, I, and E are present in the target word, I should not have wasted one guess in trying to fix their positions. Instead, I should have tried to identify the presence or absence of other consonants. Hindsight is always 20/20. PUDGY the tried-and-true 3rd member of the triad would have been a better choice.
So what is being relearned here.
Wordle is a game of luck and skill. This fact is quite evident today. Also, reusing three letters that we already knew are in the target word was a waste of opportunity. It’s not always easy to deploy eliminate-not-enumerate strategy, requiring a lot of analytical thinking. Better to go with “gut feel”?
Under the microscope.
The letter Z has been used only 7 times through the life of Wordle, but 2 times between Aug 28 and Aug 31. Its frequency grew by 40% in 4 days!
Final thoughts
My performance proves that I am just an ordinary average Wordle player. I had I wanted to put PRIZE as my 4th-guess intuitively. Analytically, PRIZE was not a good fourth guess though. Wordle is a game of luck and skill. There is always tomorrow.
© 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