Sometimes, rewriting in another language works §
The principle is simple: every day, a secret 5-letter word must be guessed by everyone on the planet from the comfort of their confinement. We each have 6 guesses: every time we make one, the website lists all correctly positioned letters, all incorrectly positioned ones, and the letters that are not in the solution.
Many bloggers have tried their hand at optimal strategies. At the time, While skimming through them, it felt like each approach had issues. That motivated me to add to the pile of suboptimal techniques with my own, hopefully less flawed, algorithm.
I like to start tackling optimality problems by betting on brute force. It sometimes works right off the bat, and when it does not, I learn a lot from it on what to improve.
Many players focus on letter frequency, but while it can feel like brute force, it does not brute-force the right solution. Indeed, the guess with the most likely letters does not segment the search space fairly. A lot of words have the most likely letters, after all.
One (admittedly suboptimal, but superior) target, is to take the list of possible solutions, and find the guess which, on average, reduces the search space the most, by eliminating the most candidate words.
