Cheating at Wordle

You might know that Wordle is a client-side game and picks the target word based on the current date, so that everyone plays the same game on any given day. Therefore it would be trivial to reverse engineer the code and compute the solution, allowing you to win in one guess every time. So, if we are going to cheat, we have to decide what is allowed. This program provides several options.

Word Lookup

By default the program acts as a dictionary, listing all the words that match a given set of hints. Hints are a compressed form of the clues you get from the game. A hint string always starts with 5 letters or underscores, representing the fixed letters in the word. You can require or exclude letters using + and .. Here are some examples:

All words starting and ending with an A:

>wordle A___A
AGORA
ALPHA
AORTA
APNEA
ARENA
AROMA

All words containing 3 or more Ts:

>wordle _____+TTT
TATTY

All words not containing any vowel:

>wordle _____-AEIOU
CRYPT
DRYLY
GLYPH
GYPSY
LYMPH
LYNCH
MYRRH
NYMPH
PYGMY
SHYLY
SLYLY
TRYST
WRYLY

You can decide for yourself how many hints you want to pass to the program. Or maybe you just want to see all the words with a T in the second position to choose one for your next guess.

Here are some more advanced usages regarding letter count and positioning:

If you put a letter in both the fixed/required and excluded sections, that means the count has to be exact:

> wordle _____+AA   # at least two As
> wordle A____+A    # at least two As, one of which must be the first letter
> wordle _____+AA-A # exactly two As, in any position

If you get a yellow clue, that actually means the target word does not contain this letter at this position (or else it would have been marked green). You can express this by putting one or more numbers after a required letter:

> wordle _____+A1   # must contain an A but not as the first letter
> wordle _____+AA1  # must contain at least two As but not as the first letter
> wordle _____+A345 # must contain an A but not as one of the last three letters

Best Starting Words

I was also interested in finding the best starting word(s). My metric for rating a guess is how many other words it eliminates on average. You can search for the best word using wordle -best and for the best two words using wordle -best2. For a single word all possible input words are considered. For two words only the smaller list of possible target words is considered. This still takes a while (~22 minutes) and is a great way to use your CPU to heat your room. For your convenience, the results are here (trying to avoid spoilers in this readme).

The percentage after each guess indicates how many words remain on average. For example TOAST 7.178% means that after guessing TOAST the clues will allow you to rule out all but 166 of 2315 possible words. This is of course only an average. You can see the distribution using -dist:

TOAST 7.178%
  0 ***************************************************************************************
 50 ***********************
100 *******************************************************************
150
200
250 *****************************
300
350
400 *************************************************
450

So in most cases you will have less than 50 words left to decide between, but there are some outliers where you will still have more than 400 words left.

Best Next Guess

You can also combine both modes and compute the best next guess for a set of hints.

For example, if you know the word starts with P and ends with A, there are five possible words that fit:

>wordle P___A
PARKA
PASTA
PIZZA
PLAZA
POLKA

And the best guess is PARKA:

>wordle -for P___A
5
PARKA 20.000%
ABACK 20.000%
ALARM 20.000%

The 5 indicates how many words match the hints, then the best guesses are listed in order.

PARKA is the best guess and might actually be correct. If not, and the first A is green, then it must be PASTA. Otherwise, if the first A is yellow, it must be PLAZA. Otherwise, if the K is green, it must be POLKA. And if none of the above apply, it must be PIZZA.