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 #452; September 14, 2022

Overall Summary: I found today’s Wordle to be close to the “middle of the road” in terms of difficulty. The NYT’s WordleBot average is 3.9 which is slightly better than the average for all the Wordles thus far (4.1), per Marc McLaren^*. As you will see later on, the LadyLuck was smiling on me today.

My score today (3) was a “birdie”, i.e., one stroke below “par” (using the golf metaphor; a typical 18-hole golf course is a par-72 golf course, meaning average for the 18 holes is par-4).  Average score of 3.9 indicates that today “bogeys” and “birdies” were about the same!

Structure: Today’s target word is following the most common characteristics of Wordle words. It has two vowels (counting Y as the sixth vowel). It has one compound consonant (TH). The letter E is the most frequent letter in the 5^th position.

Quality and the impact of the 1^st and 2^nd words:   I started with my go-to seed word – ALERT. It revealed two letters (E and T), though not in the exact positions. Since only one vowel was revealed and majority of Wordle words have two vowels or more, I needed to search for an additional vowel. I decided to stick with the second word of the ALERT/COINS/PUDGY triad.

While COINS didn’t reveal any additional letter, it reduced the universe of possible answers to 13 from more than 100. So, it did its job well. The 13 words are BUTTE, DEPTH, EMPTY, ETUDE, GETUP, HEFTY, JETTY, MUTED, PETTY, TEDDY, TEPEE, THYME, and TYPED.

Eliminate-not-Enumerate (EnotE) strategy: Now it was time to deploy the EnotE strategy. After a lot of deliberation, I considered the 3rd word of the triad (PUDGY) adequate for the role of the eliminator word. Per my preference for using one of the possibilities as an eliminator word since it gives an opportunity (the odds depend on the # of possibilities; in this case 1 out of 13) for solving the puzzle. I selected THYME as the eliminator word from the list. It would not have eliminated all the possibilities, still it was the best word from the list of the 13 possibilities.

What do you know!!!!! THYME was the target word! As I said before, the LadyLuck was smiling on me today.  My bet of using one of the possibilities as the eliminator word paid off.

Final Thoughts: My EnotE strategy and the use of one of the possibilities as the eliminator word is the enabler for today’s score of three (a birdie 😊)!

© 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)