What is the best Wordle strategy?

submited by
Style Pass
2022-01-12 17:00:10

Wordle is a rather popular online code-breaking game that works as a words-based version of the old Mastermind game. If you do not know what wordle is, you may want to read this nice overview of the game and its success published in the Guardian. If you do know what Wordle is then you have probably wondered whether there is a perfect strategy to play it. I wondered the same and dedicated a Sunday evening of my time to run some experimental analysis which I like to share with the wordle world.

The first step was to collect a dictionary of all the five letters words in English. Every day, the wordle javascript picks a word from a list of 2315 words (and accepts further 10657 words as possible entries). A more comprehensive list of 3450 words can be found here.

I then coded a wordle solver: a piece of software that will get the computer to play wordle against itself so that we can run hundreds of thousands of iterations and do some stats. The first thing to check is to calculate the null hypothesis: how successful would we be if we were to try and solve the puzzle using completely random words at every attempt? The answer, based on a Montecarlo repeat of 100k games, is 0.25%. That means we would fail 99.75% of the time. We can certainly do better than that!

Leave a Comment