Wordle Bulletin # 462 (September 24, 2022)
Prolog: The strategy I employ is designed to ensure I solve the puzzle for sure, preferably in 5 guesses or less. This strategy will rarely solve the puzzle in 3 guesses or less.
Target Word: GRATE
Typical Wordle Word Construct: 2 Vowels and one or more compound consonants (seen with >50% frequency)
Today’s Wordle Word Construct: Typical; 2 vowels (A and E) and 1 compound consonant (GR)
Difficulty: “Today’s Wordle answer is another easy one.” per Marc McLaren*; “Nothing out of the ordinary” per WordleGuru
# Of Guesses:3.9 per New York Times’ WordleBot*; 4 for WordleGuru
Average Guesses introduction-to-date for the WordleBot* community: 4.1
Average Guesses Jan ’22-to-date for WordleGuru: 3.75 (aspirational goal is 3.5)
Seed Word & the triad (all 3 words in a triad have non-overlapping and high frequency letters): SALET (SALET/RHINO/PUDGY)**
Seed Word Revelations:3 letters (A, E, T) but not their positions
# Of Possible Solutions After the Seed Word:>25
Second Word CHARD (decided to not use the second word of the triad, since the seed word had revealed the presence of 2 vowels and majority of the Wordle words contain 2 or 1 vowels)
Objectives for the 2nd word: Reveal the positions of the high frequency consonants C, H, R and D. Needed a vowel to make a legitimate word. Chose A since we want to know its position.
Revelations from the 2nd word:T he position of A (3rd spot) and the presence of R (but not its position)
# Of Possible Solutions After the 2nd Word: Four – ORATE, GRATE, IRATE, and PRATE; PRATE is not a common word, so in essence there were only 3 viable answers.
3rd word: My gut feeling was telling me that GRATE is the word of the day, for 2 reasons – 1) it has compound consonants (GR) and the letter G is more frequent in the 1st position than I or O. But I had the real risk of needing a 5th guess should GRATE not be the word of the day. I didn’t want to take the risk. It was time to deploy the EnotE strategy.
Objectives for the 3rd word: Eliminate 2 of the three possibilities.
EnotE (Eliminate-not-Enumerate) Strategy deployment: Wordle loves orthographic neighbor words (only one letter varies in the series). Today’s 4 possibilities fall in the category. As stated above, we were given an opportunity to deploy the EnotE strategy. PUDGY was able to eliminate 7 of the 8 words, thereby confirming the target word – GLORY.
Hindsight: None
Lesson Learned /Relearned: Stay with a particular triad. A triad can only be effective, if used repeatedly since the outcome is probability based. Also, the law of large number applies.
Gut feel answer: None
Final thoughts: The triad (SALET/RHINO/PUDGY) is a powerful 1-2-3 punch!
Golf Speak: “Par” for me.; Mostly “pars” (4 guesses) with a few “birdies” (3 guesses) for the WordleBot community.
© 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