What is it?
WordleBot is a tool that will take your finished Wordle and analyze it for you. It gives you overall luck and skill scores on a scale of 0 to 99 and tells you at each turn what you could possibly have done differently – if your goal is to solve Wordles in as few steps as possible.
How do I use it?
It’s very easy. Play Wordle first. Then visit the Wordle Companion, ideally using the same device and web browser.
How does it work (short version please)?
Each Wordle game starts with one of 2,309 possible solutions as the hidden word. On each turn, WordleBot chooses the word that will allow it to solve the game in as few steps as possible, assuming one of the remaining solutions is equally likely. It continues to do this until only one solution remains: the correct answer.
Why did you make it?
Months ago, before DailyExpertNews bought Wordle, we, like many others, began to wonder what the best starting word was. It seemed like a simple math question – yet everyone who approached the problem seemed to come up with a different answer.
WordleBot started out as an attempt to solve this question once and for all. But along the way we realized that (a) the answer was more complicated than it seemed; and that (b) we were more interested in how closely our guesses matched those that would be chosen by a machine designed to solve Wordles.
Thus WordleBot was born.
Okay, what’s in it for me?
We hope the bot’s advice will help you think more analytically about Wordle, making you better at solving the puzzles in the long run.
Plus, it can serve as a tie of sorts for those of you involved in competing text chains with friends and family. If a Wordle took you five turns, but you answered more efficiently than your friends, WordleBot can give you some bragging rights. If you did everything right and just had bad luck, it will tell you that too.
We leave it up to you to decide which is more important.
So what’s the best opening word?
WordleBot solves the 2,309 possible Wordles with as few guesses as possible when it starts with CRANE in normal mode and TREATED in “hard mode”.
This may surprise some readers, who have seen in various places on the Internet that people claim that words like IRATE† SALE or RAISE are the best opening lines. The truth is, it really depends on how you play and whether you’re human or computer.
The different Wordle algorithms all take a slightly different approach to solving the puzzle. Some start with knowledge of the solution list; others don’t. Some admit one of nearly 13,000 five-letter English words as valid guesses; others (like WordleBot) use a smaller set. We’ve limited WordleBot to about 4,500 words that are more common among English speakers — it didn’t seem very useful for a piece of software to recommend words like VOEMA† CUSSO† SKATT or ZEBUB†
That aside, it’s worth noting that the perfect opening word for a computer isn’t necessarily the perfect opening word for you. WordleBot has a perfect knowledge of the 2,309 solutions stored in its memory. It’s likely you don’t. So while the bot knows the exact optimal path to take from a given guess, it’s possible that you don’t and another guess is more likely to lead you to the answer.
More importantly, unless you’re playing in hard mode, every game of Wordle is solvable no matter which word you pick first. So go ahead, start with FUZZY, we won’t stop you. (And be aware: WordleBot ignores your first guess when calculating your overall skill score. Be free.)
Will WordleBot spoil the Wordle solution?
New. WordleBot will never analyze an incomplete or unresolved game; it only gives you advice for completed Wordles.
Which Wordles will WordleBot analyze?
By default, it analyzes which Wordle you last entered on your device, if you have cookies enabled in your web browser. But you can also upload a screenshot of any completed Wordle – even if it’s from months ago, provided you’ve saved the screenshot — and it will analyze that for you instead.
Does WordleBot already know the answer?
New. He knows the full list of solutions, but nothing more. It also doesn’t know if any Wordle solution has already been used.
Does WordleBot ever manage to solve a Wordle?
New. The bot solves all Wordles in six turns or less.
I play in ‘hard mode’. Will it work for me?
Yes. The bot gives advice on your Wordle no matter how you play. But the hard mode presents a challenge.
It complicates things from a computational perspective: while it’s a tempting approach to eliminate the greatest number of solutions on every guess, it’s not always the best idea. WordleBot has to come up with several steps in advance to ensure that it eliminates solutions now and doesn’t get stuck in a losing position later.
For modern computers, this added complexity is nothing to worry about, but we are somewhat limited by the computing power of some smartphones and the amount of time we can reasonably expect to have to wait for the bot’s analysis to load.
As a result, we had to create some small shortcuts for the bot to analyze games in hard mode. In particular, it isn’t always the best thing to know when it comes to a situation where there are more possible solutions than there are valid guesses left to distinguish them. In some cases, other guesses could have avoided these hard mode traps.
All of this means that the version of WordleBot that is powered by a supercomputer will probably be slightly different from the version that runs on your phone, but the differences are usually minor and we recommend that you don’t worry about them.
Guard – is WordleBot on a supercomputer somewhere?
New. It does all its calculations on demand, on your smartphone or computer.
Is it possible to beat the Bot?
Absolute. It’s hard to solve more efficiently than the bot, but it’s quite easy to get lucky.
Will this affect my Wordle streak?
New.
Does this change Wordle anything?
New. It may change the way you play Wordle, but it is completely independent of Wordle itself.
What does the skill measurement actually mean?
A skill score of 99 is what WordleBot assigns to the chosen word at each step. According to her, this is the most efficient choice to solve the puzzle in as few guesses as possible, averaged over all possible remaining solutions.
A skill score of zero is what you get if you skip a turn completely. (Although it’s impossible to skip a turn in Wordle, you can get the same effect by guessing a word you’ve already guessed: you lose a turn and you don’t learn anything new about the possible solution.)
Your skill score measures how close you were to the word chosen by the bot relative to the worst word you could have picked for that turn.
What does the measure of happiness actually mean?
For example, suppose you guess: CRANE on your first turn. The best thing that could happen would be if the hidden word was real CRANE – you would solve the Wordle in one go. That is of course very lucky.
The worst result would be five gray squares; you would be left with 263 possible solutions to dig through. Since 89 percent of the solutions share at least one letter with: CRANEthat result would be very unfortunate, despite a strategically sound choice.
Our happiness measurements indicate how unexpected the results of your guesses are, depending on what we would expect on average, given what we know about the solution at the time.
How do you determine what makes one guess ‘better’ than the other?
You may be familiar with Guess Who, a popular two-person board game in which players use yes-or-no questions to try to guess the identity of their opponent’s hidden character. A guess like “does your person wear glasses?” divides the remaining options into two groups: people who wear glasses and those who don’t. You only get one piece of information with each guess.
It’s similar to Wordle, but guesses can reveal a lot more information: each letter of each guess can turn green, yellow, or gray. That means a guess could theoretically divide solutions into up to 243 different groups (three to the fifth power, or 3^5, for the mathematically inclined). Realistically, because not every letter combination is a valid word in English, a guess can divide solutions into up to 150 different groups, found by guessing TRACK on the opening price.
In general, as a solver, you want your guesses to divide the possible solutions into as many groups as possible.
Here’s an example. Suppose you have narrowed down the possible solutions to five with your previous guesses: SIDE† CATCH† LATCH† AGREEMENT or STEAK† What do you have to guess now?
if you guess SIDEdivide the remaining solutions into two groups:
If the hidden word is SIDE, big! But if it doesn’t – which is the most likely outcome – you’re left with four possible solutions.
A smarter guess would divide these groups more efficiently, allowing you to solve the puzzle regardless of luck. Here, would WordleBot guess SLAP AIRSHIP† Watch how that changes the picture:
With this approach, you divide the solutions into five groups of one word each. You are guaranteed to get the answer on your next turn!
Why does WordleBot sometimes tell me that my guess was not a valid solution?
When Josh Wardle created Wordle, he and his partner, Palak Shah, chose a subset of the approximately 13,000 valid five-letter English words as possible solutions, meaning that many guesses, while perfectly fitting words in English, are not Wordle solutions. (Many plurals of nouns are excluded from the list of solutions, for example.) WordleBot knows the full list of solutions, and if you guess a word that isn’t on it, it will tell you so.
I played Wordle today, but WordleBot can’t find it. Why not?
You may be using a different web browser to play Wordle than the Wordle companion. (When you complete a day-long Wordle, your guesses and preferences are stored in a small file on your device called a “cookie,” and the information contained in that cookie is not currently stored across devices or browsers.) can make you use WordleBot on the same device you play Wordle on, or upload a screenshot of your Wordle to WordleBot instead.
Where can I learn more about math?
Many mathematicians and programmers have tackled this problem, but we recommend watching Grant Sanderson’s 30-minute video on how to solve Wordle with information theory.
His (shorter) follow-up video, where he ends up SALET as the optimal opener, is also worth checking out.
I have another question.
We are at your service. Mail your questions here, or leave them in the comments.
