Over that last few months the wordle game has become increasingly popular, with people sharing their daily feats on Twitter. Currently the game is hosted by the NY times which bought it the end of January 2022 from its creator. The game is rather straightforward: you have 6 guesses to find a 5-letter English word. Every guess, the game tells you if a letter is (1) not in the word [grey], (2) in the word at a different position [yellow/orange], or (3) in the word at the exact same position [green].
| Wordle 242 4/6 ⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛ ⬛🟨⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛🟩🟨🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 |
An example of the result (as it looks when shared on Twitter). My first guess was the word “PIANO”, which means the A is in the word but at a different position. My second word, “QUERY”, adds the U to the list of letters that are present. With my third guess, “STUCK”, the position of the U and the K are fixed and we now also know the letter C is involved. At this point, I was also stuck, so I got some help of my wordle-assistant program, which taught me there could only be 1 word matching all the information we had: “CAULK“. |
This seamlessly brings me to the central topic of this post: writing a program to help win this game as efficiently as possible. Not terribly original, but it’s a means to an end, as this simple project allows us to explore some more advanced topics in programming in python as well as artificial intelligence.
During this exploration I’ll be including and updating a set of tutorials as well as this post. The python side of the project will focus on efficiency and easy of use and distribution, while the AI side will focus on smart ways predicting the best possible next guess. For the latter, an important caveat is that this means that the program should also work if you’re the last player living on earth, or if you decide to play wordle in a different language or a different number of letters. This means that creating a distribution of the tweeted results of other players and comparing this with the complete set of brute-forced distributions to guess the wordle of the day in a single guess, would not satisfy my definition of AI. It is an interesting Big-data kaggle competition though.
Python Tutorials
- Classes in Python. This tutorial provides a simple introduction in the concept of classes in python.
- Child Classes. Continuing on the previous we deal now with child classes and the intricacies of function overriding and accessibility.
- Python Library on Github.
- Jupyter Notebook examples.
- Slow Python: Profiling python in Jupyter. We look into profiling a Jupyter notebook script, to find the bottlenecks.
- Slow Python: speeding up copying.
Artificial Intelligence
- Distributions of words and letters.
- Information theory of wordle?
The WordleAssistant Library and notebooks.
All tutorial code and jupyter notebooks can be found in this github repository.
