Post #1957344
2026-04-23 20:38 UTC
One of the fun things about Wordle: it's computationally practical to evaluate all possible games. So without being particularly clever, I can answer questions like, how many potential options are left (median) after guessing the word SLATE as an opening move on all potential puzzles (it's 250 of 10657).
Or, which legal opening move leaves the smallest (median) number of options remaining. This leads you to SOARE, a word that is often suggested as optimal by AI boosters -- so I think I found their optimization metric. But the choice of metric is important, as the advanced human players I've checked with do not consider SOARE to be the optimal opening in practice.
Replies (2)
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@cliffle@hachyderm.io 2026-04-23 23:37
heheheheh Had a flash of insight and added a search algorithm that is willing to break previously-learned constraints. This is something I see advanced human players (like my partner) do. So now it is doing things like ⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜ slate ⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜ brick 🟨⬜🟨🟨🟨 donga 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 grand and ⬜⬜⬜⬜🟩 slate 🟨🟨⬜⬜⬜ ruing 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 crude
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@ldcd@social.treehouse.systems 2026-04-24 05:46
@cliffle https://aditya-sengupta.github.io/wordle/ A friend wrote this up with some formalism a while back