Improve at Wordle with my Wordle Trainer!

 What do you get when you force a large population to stay at home for months on end due to a global health crisis? The sudden rise in popularity of a 5-letter word guessing game of course! 

When the Wordle craze reached my social circles, I tried my best to ignore it. As an avid player of strategy games (both board games and video games), I wondered why such a simple game, restricted to the confines of the English lexicon, deserved such attention. Yet after a few attempts, I was hooked. Over time, I have come to understand why people love this game so much. With each attempt, the game gives users enough information to make a guess at a word they usually already know. Wordle is rarely a test of knowledge/vocabulary, but a test of logical reasoning (primarily process of elimination), and a general understanding of the English lexicon (e.g. words tend to have vowels). Additionally, like the crossword, Wordle presents exactly the same challenge for all users every day, which promotes friendly competition and comparison within a community. However, Wordle is not overly challenging like some crosswords can be - which is why crossword solvers are a relatively niche group of individuals, while Wordle solvers are in seemingly every household.

Nevertheless, despite rarely failing to guess the Wordle of the day, I came to the realization that I wasn't playing the game optimally. As someone who identifies as a min-maxer, I strive to find the most optimal path in any game/task I undertake. With Wordle it was clear to me that there is indeed a more optimal way to play the game not only to minimize failure, but to reduce the number of attempts.

Thus, I built my Wordle solver. Well - it's actually labeled "Wordle Trainer" because it's not really a solver. It provides the words that are most probable based on the letter distribution of 5-letter words in the English language. See below a more detailed description of how to use the program.

How-To:

• Step1: Guess the word with the highest probability score, ignoring words that are unfamiliar
• For example to start off, the program says raise, aries, serai, and arise all have the same probability score. However, of these words, it is clear that serai is the most uncommon of these words so likely not the best choice. However, the other words seem possible! Note they all have the same score because they all are 5-letter words with an 'a','r','i','e', and 's'.

Image 1: How to interpret word probability chart

• Step 2: Input green, yellow, and grey letters into the program after guessing the word.
• For example, in the Wordle below my first guess was "arise." In this, we have eliminated the letters 'r', 'i', and 's.' We also know that there is an 'a' that is NOT in the first position and an 'e' that is NOT in the last position.

Image 2: Example first guess

• To input this into the program, you would do the following:

Image 3: How to update program after guessing

• Note: there are no commas between the letters 'r', 'i', and 's'. You can simply enter all letters consecutively without commas or spaces. The same goes for the Yellow Letters. If you get multiple.
• Step 3: Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you get the answer!
• As you gain new information about the word, keep inputting the letters into the appropriate places. Don't erase anything you've added from previous guesses!
• Each time you enter letters, the word probability score updates. See below my path to solving this Wordle (8/12/2022)

How does this Work and Help me be better at Wordle?:

First, getting this to work was made much easer thanks to 1littlecoder's youtube video, which helped me setup streamlit cloud and the basic logic for Wordle. But in terms of how my program provides a "probability score" - it's a relatively simple idea. Words that have letters that are most commonly found in the totality of the english 5-letter lexicon are up-ranked. This method eliminates the most words the fastest. Naturally, this up-ranks words with vowels, which is what most Wordle players tend to focus on. The word "audio" is a popular first guess because it contains 4 vowels. However, interestingly, some consonants are even more common than vowels, which is why my Wordle trainer actually suggests "arise" or "raise" as the first guess rather than "audio". As it turns out, 'r' and 's' are extremely common. Of course, this isn't something the human mind is capable of knowing easily, but a computer program with access to corpora from libraries used for natural language processing can figure this out in a jiffy!

However, I understand that using this program everyday to solve Wordle isn't the most fun, which is why I stress that this isn't a Wordle solver. What I have gained from using this program is a general intuition of how the english lexicon works. For instance, I'm able to solve Wordle's much faster because I know that 't', 'n' and 'c' are extremely common consonants that I should try and incorporate in my guesses early on. I often try Wordle myself first, and then use my program to see if there were more optimal guesses, especially if I got down to the last or second to last try. This program isn't meant to replace your own thinking, it's meant to improve it!

Thank you for reading, and hope you find this project of mine interesting and fun!

Adi Balaji