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Researchers used math to crack Wordle

30 points by hhs

by boothby

2 subcomments

by jezzamon

2 subcomments

I thought this was old news? I remember people making videos about using information theory to solve Wordle back when it was particularly hyped. (After writing this I checked, there's even a 3 blue 1 brown video on this)
My favourite along those lines was solving wordle in 1 guess using the distribution of coloured squares on social media https://www.kaggle.com/code/benhamner/wordle-1-6

by gkoberger

1 subcomments

This isn't groundbreaking science, sure, but it is a great way to get people interested in a topic. After all, it wouldn't be on Hacker News if the word Wordle wasn't in it. I'm a huge fan of using things like this to teach science, math and engineering.
We started using "Solve 100 Wordles programmatically" as our technical interview, and people _love_ it. They get really into it and have fun. It's pretty easy to do inefficiently, and it's great to watch people build on it and try to improve their scores.
It has two benefits: 1/ everyone clearly understands the problem 2/ people see it as fun rather than a drag.

by dredmorbius

3 subcomments

by starky

0 subcomment

>In simulations, their approach solved 99% of Wordle puzzles, while the traditional method solved just 90%.
This seems wrong to me, getting a 98%+ solve rate for Wordle is pretty common.

by trollbridge

1 subcomments

Hacker News commenter uses grep -i ^.u...$ /usr/share/dict/words | grep -i c | grep -i -v '^..c..$' | grep -i -v '^...c.$' to crack today's Wordle

by adamgordonbell

0 subcomment

It's trivial to determine the best guess at any point based on what options it cuts out.
But I ended up building an alphaWordle, using MCTS and a reinforcement loop just to get a feel for how AlphaGo approach to solving games works.
It's not a 'smart' way to solve it, but its pretty instructive and I could compare its moves to the theoretical best move to see it progress.
https://github.com/adamgordonbell/bitter-lesson-demos

by anigbrowl

0 subcomment

I think most people understand such problems are analytically tractable, but not everyone understands that the challenge and pleasure of a game is being able to do so unaided.

by _whiteCaps_

0 subcomment

by senderista

0 subcomment

Isn’t “maximize information gain at each step” already the standard approach to such problems?

by kps

0 subcomment

by ano-ther

0 subcomment

by kens

1 subcomments

What I'm interested in is the best starting word. Using Shannon entropy, the paper finds that it is "tares".

by plants

0 subcomment

plug to my blog post where I did something similar a few years back! https://willbeckman.com/wordle.html :). Not sure if this is an identical solution, but it was a fun little project.