Wordle Bulletin – Wordle #454 (September 16, 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 #454; September 16, 2022
Overall Summary: I flamed out. I rushed and paid the price (as explained below).
Per Marc McLaren* “Today’s Wordle answer is quite possibly the hardest one ever. It’s certainly the most difficult we’ve had for about four or five months. Seriously, it’s almost impossible. Even the best Wordle start words may not help you that much. Good luck out there!” The NYT’s WordleBot reported that the average score of players was 6.3 and Wordle #454 was #1 on Twitter. Need I say anymore!! In golf parlance, there were a lot of bogeys (single, double, triple…)
Structure: It has two vowels (A and E) but no compound consonant (BT). Also, one consonant is repeated (R). Two vowels are common but so is at least one compound consonant.
Quality and the impact of the 1st and 2nd words: I started with my go-to-seed word – ALERT. It revealed 3 letters one letter (T, E and R). I was in “heaven”. But soon reality will bring me down.
Since 2 vowels had been revealed, I didn’t want to use the second word of the triad (COINS). Instead, I wanted to discover additional consonants. I chose the word SNACK. It has the letters S, N and C (common to COINS).
SNACK didn’t reveal any new consonant, but it did eliminate a lot of words.
Still there were 50+ possible words. To make matters worse, there are three sets of orthographic neighbors. These are [WAFER, WAGER, WADER, WAVER], [RAPED, RAGED RAVED, RAKED, RAZED], and [PAGER, PAPER, PAYER, PARER, PAVER, PALER]
Eliminate-not-Enumerate (EnotE) strategy: PAWED was the 1st elimination word I tried. It eliminated all the words beginning with W. The other 2 orthographic neighbor clusters were still there to torment me. I entered GLYPH as the 2nd elimination word. It eliminated PAGER, PALER, and PAYER. After this I got into the “enumeration” hell, largely because of my sloppiness.
Hindsight: After GLYPH, since only three words in the orthographic set were left – PAPER, PARER and PAVER, I should have tried another elimination word including the letters V, P and R with a P in the 3rd position. VAPOR was the right elimination word. I would have solved the puzzle in 6 guesses! For today’s puzzle, a “double bogey” was a great score.
Lesson re-learned: Don’t be sloppy! I got sloppy. Had I listed all the possibilities on a clean sheet of paper, I would have gotten it. This is one of my habits that appears hard to break. Many times in the past I have given up number of guesses required to solve because of this bad habit. Today’s story is that of “could” and “should” have been. Anyway, that’s life. There is always tomorrow (one hopes).
Final Thoughts: To say that I am disappointed would be the understatement of the year! I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Hope I live another day to make amends for my sloppiness.
© 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)