WORDLE — The Science Fiction Writer’s Approach
I have been amused and delighted with a New York Time word puzzle game called Wordle, which is available, free to play, once per day, here: https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
It was developed by a man named Wardle, a welsh software engineer to amuse his girlfriend, who loved games.
The rules are similar to a pen-and-paper games such as Jotto or Mastermind. The player has six tries to guess a secret five-letter word, and is told when a letter is correct, and when its position is correct. Only dictionary words are allowed as guesses.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
For example:
Gray indicates a letter not found in the secret word; gold if the letter is correct but not the position; green if the position is correct.
Now, I think the example given above is bad tactics, because it is a waste of a guess in guess #2 to select a word with an E in the last position, when it is already known not to be there. More, it is a waste of a guess in guess #3 to repeat the letter R in the first position rather than eliminate more letters.
Now, being a science fiction writer, and therefore having a methodical bent of mind, I decided to adopt a scientifically fictional methodology.
First, the science:
I looked up the frequency of letter using in the English language, and then, later, growing wiser, the frequency of letter use in five-letter words in the English language.
Those of you who remember your Morse Code from Boy Scouts will recall that Morse deliberately made the more frequently appearing letters shorter and simpler dash-dot combinations.
In order, the letters more frequent in five letter words are:
a e r o i s t l n u y c d h m p b g k w f v z x j q
Naturally, to maximize efficiency, I should guess the most frequent letters first, but not use any words like ARRAY which repeat a letter. This is a “brute force” approach, trying to get as many letters as possible in as few words.
ADIEU is a fine guess for a first guess Wordle word, since it identifies all vowels but O and sometimes Y. However, this means every subsequent guess will have at least one useless letter, and I am trying to clear as much of the alphabet as possible.
So I calculated the following words guess the most letters in the least guesses, grouping the more frequent letters as much as possible in the earlier guesses:
ABIDE
SNORT
LYMPH
QUICK
WRONG
The first two words eliminate all but one of the first nine most frequent letters: a e r o i s t l n
Not all letters in the alphabet can be eliminated in five guesses, so the unknown letters remaining after the last guess are the least frequent: f v z x j
As you can see, QUICK in the fourth guess repeats the letter I, and WRONG repeats three letters in the fifth guess. But, as best I can tell, no English word exists that does not repeat at least three letters. And it is absurd to guess Q, since that is the least frequent letter of all in the five-letter word list, but I could not think of any other word that would allow me to eliminate UCK that did not repeat a letter already guessed.
(Any only five letter words are allowed, not four letter words, so get your mind out of the gutter.)
However, the Wordle game also gives you position information, and the secret word must be a five letter word. The New York Times prefers common words over obscure ones, and never uses a plural ending in S as a word.
It may be wiser to guess for position for the fifth guess rather than eliminate two letters.
Second the fiction: use your imagination. Think of what word it might be, imagining every non-eliminated letter in every position.
Usually this is enough information, knowing the rules of English, to guess a solid guess.
The basic trick is to keep an eye on the gold letters, and not to guess any word with a letter in the wrong position. Also basic is to keep in mind that any green or gold letter may be a repeated letter.
Using this brute-force method, I have played hundreds of times, including practice games, and failed to guess exactly twice.
And there are websites willing to give you hints or help you think of words.
Now, please note the brute force approach favors guessing letters over guessing position, and may involve an extra guess or two above a more elegant positional method.
For example, if given the puzzle above, the science fiction approach gives:
Once you have five letters, no more need be eliminated.
This involves one guess more than the example given above: a seemingly wasted guess to eliminate the letters in LYMPH.
And, to use the science fictional method, one has to be “fictional” enough, that is, imaginative enough, to be willing to cycle through possibilities enough to determine that the only five letter word in English with the letters b, e, r, s and u is REBUS.
Is this method perfect? By no means. If there were a perfect tactic to win every time, there is little challenge in the game.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
