Every possible Wordle solution visualized

https://www.perthirtysix.com/essay/wordle-solutions-visualized

by jonbaer • 3 years ago

293 70 3 years ago

mk_stjames• 3 years ago

The word list being checked against isn't quite the same as whatever Wordle is using for possible guesses (this is mentioned on the page); for example, "DUCKY" is a valid Wordle guess, but shown as invalid when entered into this tool.

The original Wordle word list was contained in plaintext in the game's javascript (which is what is used for this map), however I believe the current version used on NYT is using a different list. I don't know that the current set of guessable possibilities / the list of words possible to be chosen is known. I think some people have mentioned the list may have been expanded.

q845712• 3 years ago

I clicked on the 'z's and noticed the same for "WHIZZ"

I guess the article does say: > Note that these words only represent the list Wordle uses for possible solutions; there are many more guessable 5-letter words.

fsckboy2• 3 years ago

what you say is somewhat correct, but this site says that these are the valid answers, not including the valid guesses, so DUCKY wouldn't be expected here.

personally, I'd prefer a tool that included all balid guesses and wouldn't lead me so precisely to answers. there's small c cheating and big C Cheating :)

the tweaks introduced by the Times, etc., yes.

TylerE2• 3 years ago

Wordle has been trivially cheatable from day one using any of the gazillion scrabble solvers out there. Treat unknown positions as wildcards.

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

The important point is that there are 2 lists:

1. Words that can be entered as valid guesses

2. Words that are ever used as solutions in Wordle

I think this is a great design choice (and IIRC was part of the original game). That is, Wordle doesn't want to use really obscure or uncommon slang words as the solution, as that would make the game less enjoyable (I wouldn't like it so much if the solution was a word I'd never heard of). But, when I get stuck and can't think of a word that will fit as my next guess, sometimes I just go into "mash keyboard mode" so hopefully I'll find something that will fit and get more information about the solution. More often than not something fits, and I'm usually surprised my guess is an actual word.

So, to your point, DUCKY is a valid guess but will never be an actual solution in Wordle.

mortenjorck• 3 years ago

While I had kind of intuited this (I’ve developed my strategy over time to always favor the more common word when choosing among multiple possibilities), I didn’t realize some of the places where Wordle cuts its solution set. Specifically, I somehow never noticed that solutions are never s-suffixed plural, but you can clearly see it in the visualization if you try entering a word with four letters.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

I think the design choice is key to the game, but for a different explanation. “Be liberal in what you accept” -> don’t reject a valid but obscure word as a guess, because people who know it’s a word will be rightly annoyed that the game is kneecapping their play.

ghaff7• 3 years ago

There are actually 3 lists if you count the Wordlebot 2.0 [1] list:

1. The words that are solutions in the current game

2. An approximately 2x size list that is the space Wordlebot uses to "play" in. Supposedly it's still common words though some seem pretty weird to even a native English speaker (and some British slang leaks through as well). For example, titer was one of Wordlebot's recommended guesses today which I correctly sort of assumed had something to do with titration but would probably never have guessed it.

3. A larger pool of words that Wordle will let you enter as guesses

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/upshot/wordle-wordlebot-n...

CamperBob2• 3 years ago

I'm still sore over HUNKY.

BurningFrog2• 3 years ago

This is why "which of the possible words is most common?" is an important question when solving.

RexM• 3 years ago

I really like this visualization of the possible words with the known information.

It’s possible to have two yellow letters in the same position, but it doesn’t look like it’s possible to represent that with this.

jameshart• 3 years ago

Also no way to inform it that you have seen a yellow+green for a repeated letter.

ar9av• 3 years ago

Very nice. I think the NYT has been tweaking the word list a bit. I know they've removed a few words, but don't know if they've added any. I don't know how much the list has drifted over time.

keyle2• 3 years ago

I still play Wordle daily with my folks. Gets the juices flowing and gets daily conversations started.

Anyway, HORSE was used like 3 days apart. I was shocked, and annoyed.

See, if I were to write Wordle, which arguably I did too (see http://curdle.me) but I digress, I'd make an array of all words, randomize it, store that, match one per day and call it done. Years worth of fun.

But that doesn't appear to be what NYT is doing, they pick a random word every day? Which means that my evil plan of starting every single day with the same word might never get a N1 or I might get it more than once in a year!

brokensegue• 3 years ago

You are mistaken https://wordfinder.yourdictionary.com/wordle/answers/

Wordle answers are now hand picked each day by an editor.

keyle2• 3 years ago

You are correct, I think what has happened is I confused WORSE and HORSE and must have used HORSE when it was incorrect but remembered it as the solution. Thanks for the correction!

BurningFrog2• 3 years ago

My impression of that announcement was that the editor sometimes handpicks a word, but it's still mostly random.

oliwary• 3 years ago

Cool! I love this kind of intuitive exploratory visualizations.

I wonder how it could be done for my 5x5 letter wordle variant https://squareword.org. Technically you would need 25 small alphabets, one for each letter. But that seems tricky to fit on a screen in such a visually pleasing way. Will have to look into if there would be a better way :)

TuringTest• 3 years ago

Some advice: you may want to improve the instructions of the game. There's no clear indication of what to do when the first 5-letter word has been typed - it merely bumps the word if you type more letters, or shows a cryptic message "Type your guess on the keyboard to begin!" if the square is clicked.

As for visualizations, you may want to take a look at mathematical relations [1]. Each cell is a variable with the alphabet as its domain (which is pruned as you guess correct values), and the words are 5-arity relations between rows and columns. You may represent the local relations surrounding the cell pointed by the mouse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relation_(mathematics)#Represe...

charles_f• 3 years ago

Since we're talking about wordle dictionary there, I find it relevant to plug this in - the best words to solve wordle https://www.fev.al/posts/wordle/

graderjs3• 3 years ago

I love how E is common in every position except the first.

I discovered something interesting with ChatGPT. It finds the following really hard:

Can you make me 5 words, where each word has the letter E, as follows:

E---- -E--- --E-- ---E- ----E

ChatGPT3.5:

Eager

Exile

Cheese

Temple

Embrace

I tried it with ChatGPT4 too, but got similar fail results, but history is currently down and I hit my "25 messages in 3 hours" cap.

yreg2• 3 years ago

GPT 4:

    Elope
    Defer
    Mover
    Aisle
    Plume

If you think about it, it's pretty cool that we are at the stage where GPT not being able to satisfy such request correctly is 'interesting'.

graderjs3• 3 years ago

Can you provide the prompt you used? I want to benchmark my GPT4

jstx1• 3 years ago

ChatGPT is surprisingly bad at Wordle - ask for 5 letter words with some constraints and it regularly returns 6+ letter words.

nashashmi• 3 years ago

Too much logic required here. Change to "...guess five letter word Where e is the first letter. Do it again where e is the second letter." And so on.

graderjs3• 3 years ago

Did you try that? What did you get? :) ;p xx ;p

dragontamer• 3 years ago

I know everyone has their "Starting Word" by this point, but this graphic seems very good at discovering good starting words.

"SLATE" seems to have a huge number of solutions on each letter: 300+ words available on S----, 400+ words available on ----E. The smallest is -L----, which has 200 words, still a good size all else considered.

I'm not too sure on how to evaluate the "best starting word", but maybe I'll try "SLATE" next time I play Wordle.

EDIT: Some people are interested in "two starting words". Seems like "ROBIN" hits a lot of words that SLATE misses. -O--- in the 2nd letter was the most common letter+position after the letters S L A T and E were banned. "CHILD" also seems like another good followup word after SLATE.

crazydoggers• 3 years ago

Some MIT researchers actually had found that SALET performed 1% better as a starting word. [1] However NYT recently updated the permissible word list, and TARSE is currently the statistically best starting word.

1. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/how-algorithm-...

layer8• 3 years ago

If you want to cover the ten most frequent solution letters with the first two words, here is some inspiration: https://new.wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=eraotl...

Hnrobert42• 3 years ago

From this I concluded the best starting word is FEAST. Each column has a high likelihood of being correct. And damn if I didn’t get today’s Wordle on the second guess with this strategy. Anecdotal data FTW!

ghaff7• 3 years ago

Wordlebot likes SLATE and LEAST a bit better.

But, yeah, mix of common consonants and vowels.

I also think I've found that mixing things up because your usual word did really well the day before doesn't really seem to be a good strategy because if the solution is a lot different, just eliminating some of the most common letters is still pretty effective.

macintux2• 3 years ago

I’ve been picking different starting words each day, and Wordlebot is very polite when it tells me I’m being an idiot.

“THROW is a decent opening word, and a distinctive one!”

ggop• 3 years ago

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/upshot/wordle-bot.h... suggests SLATE as well. This is a bot that analyses your game and suggests possible answers at each step.

wodenokoto• 3 years ago

If the author is reading: zero probability and near zero have indistinguishable colors.

That should be considered an error. Any letter that isn't impossible should be clearly labelled as possible. Right now you get lines pointing to semingly black letters, which looks like a mistake in the visualization.

shriracha4• 3 years ago

Author here! This is great feedback that I just implemented. Thanks.

tremarley• 3 years ago

Will this be open sourced? I'd love to see a version with more than 5 letters & a word list injection

ghaff7• 3 years ago

There are a ton of variants out there including more letters and more words and I'm sure there's Javascript you can download whether or not you still can from the Times.

I have to say I played around with a number of these at one point but I really ended up coming back to just playing Wordle once a day. The multi-word ones in particular really force a different playing style.

prof-dr-ir• 3 years ago

It looks beautiful, but am I the only one who is irked by the fact that the lines cannot be joined at will?

For example, if I type PO_N_ there are two allowed words (POINT and POUND) but this particular visualization does not distinguish them from POIND and POUNT.

xkgt• 3 years ago

actually if you hover over 3rd character, the visualization prunes the irrelevant path.

macintux2• 3 years ago

One downside to using my iPad for most of my daily content consumption is the number of features I’ll never discover on interesting sites like this.

blowski2• 3 years ago

Tangent to the Wordle tool posted. Is PerThirtySix a reference to FiveThirtyEight? The latter must be one of the most well-known brands in the sports analytics space. Or is 36 an important number in sports?

EA• 3 years ago

Yes. NBA games are 48 minutes in regulation. No one plays the full 48 minutes, but a lot of players (starters mainly) do play 36 minutes. So, 36 minutes has become a common time period of production time used for analytics in the NBA.

blowski2• 3 years ago

Ah I see, like on this page - https://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_2021_per_mi.... Thanks!

clircle• 3 years ago

I think this visualization would be a lot more informative if it was ... just a list of all the five letter words. lol.

I swear, data scientists just visualize things because they can, and don't think about what information they want people to take away.

shriracha4• 3 years ago

Maker of the visualization here! Curious how you would use a plaintext list of 2309 words to get at some of the questions I mentioned on the tool, like "how many words use Y as the only vowel?".

bnralt• 3 years ago

Do you play Wordle? I actually thought this was interesting, since it’s something I’ve often wondered while playing it. “The first letter is U and the fourth is E, how big the set of possible answers is now?”

madcaptenor2• 3 years ago

This is a nice visualization.

A feature request: I'd like to be able to enter more than one "yellow" letter in a given position.

shriracha4• 3 years ago

Maker of the visualization here! Super cool to see all of the great feedback here. Thanks for checking it out.

mym1990• 3 years ago

Is the site inspired by FiveThirtyEight or Nate Silver in general? Very nifty, highly performant, and takes me back to when FiveThirtyEight was just a small stats blog.

shriracha4• 3 years ago

Thank you! My friend and I started this project pretty early on during COVID. FiveThirtyEight was definitely a design influence, along with pudding.cool, some NYT pieces, and others. There are some things on the data side that FiveThirtyEight does sports which I'm not a fan of, like their emphasis on "all in one" metrics to measure performance, but overall they definitely do a great job with their presentation.

lifefeed• 3 years ago

Does Wordle not allow plurals or past tense? DARES and CARES aren't in this visualization, neither are DARED or CARED.

I know those simple words don't come up often, but I don't know if they're actually not allowed.

jtokoph• 3 years ago

I believe they are not possible

jerome-jh• 3 years ago

At least "xenon" is missing.

Every possible Wordle solution visualized

Related Stories