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.
WordleGuru Grid
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)