Wordle Solver is a dark-mode implementation of this solver's interface which is designed to solve daily Wordle puzzles.
The idea is to have the solver make human-possible guesses while still solving the puzzle in as few guesses as possible.
The production app can be accessed here: https://akaritakai.net/wordle/
Note: This has not been updated for the changes made with the NY Times acquisition.
The application does not require any network access once the page is loaded, and is very performant, even on mobile devices.
It should never lose a game.
Guess Distribution:
1: 1 0.04%
2: ## 58 2.51%
3: ######################### 1137 49.11%
4: ####################### 1031 44.54%
5: ## 86 3.71%
6: 2 0.09%
Average Guesses Per Day: ~3.496
In the future, I will look at additional optimization for the first and second word choices to reduce the average guesses per day.
Both Yarn and Node.js must be installed on the host.
To build, run yarn build. This will create a dist directory with the compiled files. Then, open the
dist/index.html file in your browser.
To host, upload the files to a web server and make the files in dist available at the root with dist/index.html as
the default page.
Wordle is backed by two lists. One list is all the possible words that could ever be solutions (2,315 words). The other is all the possible guesses that could ever be made (12,972 words).
Most of the words in the second list are unlikely to ever be guessed by a human (e.g. 'SERAI' which is a synonym for an old term: caravansaries, which were inns that catered to caravans in the Middle East of centuries past).
Yet, not all the words in the second list are inhuman. For example, the second list contains 'WINGS', a perfectly natural guess.
This Wordle solver uses all the words in the first list (and knows that only words in the first list will ever be our solution), plus some hand-picked words from the second list.
To perform the hand-picking, the second list (minus the first list) was sorted by frequency using the WordFrequencyData API in Mathematica. Then, words were examined by hand to see if they were common words, with uncommon words being manually removed. When a run of 20-50 words was encountered that were all uncommon, all remaining words were assumed to be uncommon and discarded.
Every round, the solver will look at the words that could possibly be the solution, and use the word that removes the most entropy from the puzzle. The solver uses these tie-breaks in order if two words would remove the same amount of entropy:
- The number of eliminations made in the worst case
- The number of squares matched as present or correct across all possible solutions
- The number of squares matched as correct across all possible solutions
- Lexicographic order
- Calculate what the Wordle of the given day is and find an aesthetically pleasing path.
- Allow for inhuman guess strength for Wordle by allowing the full list of words being guessed.
- Add support for other Wordle-like games (e.g. Queerdle, Byrdle, etc.)
- Add support for solving words that aren't just 5 letters long (e.g. 8 letters).
- Add support for bigger word lists and frequency info (e.g. Google books, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, other sources? etc.)
- Add support for calculating overall n-gram frequency to provide info of what the word might look like even if the word isn't known
- Add support for challenge modes (e.g. challenge mode in wordle and harder modes in Absurdle)