nisiprius wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 1:06 pm
It seems like a very good challenge for various forms of AI and also for good old straight computer programming.
There are only 2,315 possible answers. At any given stage in the game, there are only a limited number of them that can fit the pattern that has already been revealed. I don't know if Wardle has published the actual list. It would probably be a reasonable first-year computer programming exercise to write a program to list all the words fitting a given grey/yellow/green answer pattern.
I assume a complete dictionary of some kind is used to decide what is a legal "word" for each answer attempt. A Scrabble dictionary has about 700 pages, 60 words per page, so about 40,000. Again, a computer could fairly easily, starting from what's been revealed, find the dictionary word which, when played, will cut down the number of possible answers the most. That's probably not the optimum strategy, though. The optimum strategy is, if there are N words left to try, to test all possible
combinations of trial words for the remaining plays, i.e. 40,000
N to see which restrict the possibilities the most. That's probably too many for brute force on home computers at this point.
I'm too lazy to search, quite possibly there is already a purpose-built robot Wordle player as I write this.
It would be interesting to see if a self-teaching AI program could evolve a good strategy.
If the hidden word selection is random, then a relatively simple program would do.
If the hidden word selection is adversarial, and also learns from the selection of guesses in the previous rounds, then it becomes an interesting game-theoretic problem.
Thus, need criteria and rules.
Criteria could be easy:
- play 1000 times,
- count average number of guesses to solve.
- Minimize that average.
Or could be fancy:
- apply a utility function on the number of guesses to solve,
- average the utility function score.
E.g.:
- solving in 1 guess is 20 points,
- solving in 2 guesses is 10 points,
- solving in 3 guesses is 7 points,
- solving in 4 guesses is 5 points,
- solving in 5 guesses is 4 points,
- solving in 6 guesses is 3 points,
- not solving is negative 10 points.
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