[HN Gopher] Show HN: A Wordle for the command line (Spanish and ...
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       Show HN: A Wordle for the command line (Spanish and English)
        
       Author : flyingpumba
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2022-01-22 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | ilimilku wrote:
       | Great, but it's buggy. I guessed the correct word (nancy), but it
       | rejected it. Perhaps there is something wrong with the
       | capitalization.
        
       | bryceneal wrote:
       | Neat! One thing that has interested me about this game is whether
       | or not there is an optimal first word. Is there is a word that
       | contains the 5 letters which most commonly appear in the
       | language? Preferably where more of the letters appear at their
       | most common index? If so it seems one should use this word as the
       | first guess each time given we have no other information other
       | than the length of the word.
        
         | MattRix wrote:
         | Someone who wrote a solver said the optimal starting word is
         | ROATE, since it had a bunch of vowels etc.
        
         | gpvos wrote:
         | The order of letters in the guess word may also be relevant, to
         | give you as much information as possible (green is better than
         | yellow; there may be branches in the search tree where twice
         | the same letter in a word is advantageous).
        
         | jvm___ wrote:
         | RSTLNE are the letters people use for the final game in wheel
         | of fortune. I'd assume a word made of those letters would be
         | pretty good.
         | 
         | I use one that involves your eyes, but there are probably
         | others.
        
           | MattRix wrote:
           | Those letters are probably the best if you're limited to a
           | single vowel, but there are vowels that are more common than
           | some of those letters. As I posted in another comment, I saw
           | someone who wrote a solver say that the optimal starting word
           | is ROATE.
        
         | GranPC wrote:
         | There's been a lot of research into finding the optimal
         | strategy to beat Wordle; I've avoided reading up on them so far
         | because I enjoy the process of casually figuring it out with my
         | friends, but I think many of them have been posted to this
         | forum.
        
         | rgovostes wrote:
         | There have been a few attempts to answer this.
         | 
         | One approach is to look at which guess, averaging across all
         | answer words, gets the most hits. You'd expect a word that uses
         | several of the most common letters ETAOIN etc. This helps you
         | quickly discover letters that appear in the answer. Using this
         | strategy, a common first guess is SOARE, explained here:
         | 
         | https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle...
         | 
         | Missed letters provide information as well, though. Instead of
         | optimizing for the most green/yellow hits, you could divide the
         | entire solution space by the 3^5 possible green/yellow/gray
         | patterns generated by the initial guess. Which initial guess
         | divides most evenly, so you can reliably eliminate 99% of the
         | possible answers? That would be ROATE, explained here:
         | 
         | https://medium.com/@tglaiel/the-mathematically-optimal-first...
         | 
         | Note that ROATE and SOARE are very similar to one another.
         | There are 729 T's in the Wordle wordlist and 669 S's, so ROATE
         | seems like the slightly better answer.
         | 
         | (If going by the first strategy, why SOARE and not ROATE if
         | there are more T's? Probably because there are 3x as many words
         | that start with S than R in the list, so it optimizes towards
         | locking in the first letter.)
        
         | gpvos wrote:
         | I usually keep ETAOIN SHRDLU in mind. ATONE would be a good
         | one. It shouldn't really be too hard to exhaustively calculate
         | an optimal strategy for the complete list of five-letter words;
         | my /usr/share/dict/words has only 6806 of them.
         | 
         | Edit: for all the five-letter words in the above list, the
         | order of frequency is ESAROILTNDUCYMPHBGKFWVZJXQ. Wordle has a
         | different list.
        
         | pshc wrote:
         | A word with three vowels to start would probably give many
         | tells
        
         | banana_giraffe wrote:
         | oater, orate, or roate are probably the optimal first
         | selections. Given Wordle's word list, they let you make the
         | largest prunes the list of possible answers.
        
       | GranPC wrote:
       | Cool! Linking to the dictionary definition of the word is a nice
       | touch :)
        
       | gbolcer wrote:
       | Fun, but hard to play on command line versus Web app. Also,
       | gradlew complained of the enie on line 76 for some reason.
        
       | japhib wrote:
       | Cool! I'd recommend tweaking the dictionary a bit though ... here
       | are the first 5 words in the English one:
       | 
       | aahed aalii aargh abaca abaci
       | 
       | I don't think I would ever think of putting in any of those
       | words, so if that was the solution, I'd just be stuck. (Are they
       | actually real words?)
        
         | powersnail wrote:
         | Apparently, aahed is the past tense of aah.
         | [webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/aahed)
         | 
         | Edit: typo
        
         | gullywhumper wrote:
         | The list of acceptable wordle words is available. I'm sure
         | someone else has made the effort to make it a little more
         | accessible.
         | 
         | view-
         | source:https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/main.e65ce0a5.js
        
         | [deleted]
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-22 23:01 UTC)