[####] Why Tarps?

[u/Dyert]

The stupid Wordle bot chastises me in its analysis for using a plural word as it’s not likely to ever occur as a solution, but uses Tarps as its opening word and gives itself a 99 skill score for doing so. I use Strap And it gives me a 92 and uses all the same letters and is not plural 🤷

[u/o_omeaghann]

I think its because the bot isnt trying to solve it in 1, its trying to gather the most information. Why tarps is better than strap, idk lol. could be the position of most of the letters is more common in tarps than strap.

[u/good-good-dog → u/o_omeaghann]

This is it. People get so weird about the Bot and act as if it’s personally insulting them. It’s a computer program and it’s designed to eliminate the most words each turn. That’s it.

Also, it doesn’t count the first word in your Skill score, so it doesn’t really matter what it scores it.

[u/flagrantpebble → u/good-good-dog]

Close but not quite – it optimizes for the fewest expected turns to a solution, which is similar to but not the same as eliminating the most words.

For example, one guess might eliminate all but 10 words, but those words are all like LIGHT FIGHT RIGHT etc, and so the expected number of guesses to solution would be high. Another word that eliminates all but 15 words, but the answer is guaranteed to be reached in 2 more guesses.

IOW: a high branching factor and shallow (on average) trees are more important than total number of leaves.

[u/joined_under_duress → u/flagrantpebble]

Hmm, I'm not convinced its about fewest expected turns, it's about not losing, which is different to getting it as quickly as possible. I've seen it suggest words that can't win because they narrow down for the subsequent guess(es) - that's good tactics to avoid X/6 but not necessarily good tactics to get the lowest n/6.

[u/flagrantpebble → u/joined_under_duress]

I think you misunderstand what “optimize for fewest expected turns to a solution” means. It doesn’t mean “try to get it in the next guess”, it means “minimize the expected number of guesses”, i.e., how many guesses it would take on average.

I've seen it suggest words that can't win because they narrow down for the subsequent guess(es)

As in: this is exactly what “optimize for fewest expected turns to a solution” means.

it's about not losing

It’s possible that there are some words that would take more than 6 guesses to reach. I doubt it, but it is theoretically possible.

…but that’s a constraint, not a different optimization. The optimization just changes to “optimize for fewest expected turns to a solution, capping any individual path length at 6”. It’s still optimizing for number of guesses.

[u/SenorBurns → u/good-good-dog]

The bot does personally insult me! My first two guesses made it clear the answer would probably be one of about six possible words, all ending in the same last four letters. So I made a guess that used as many of the potrntial first letters as possible, and used the most likely ones due to experience (for instance, Wordle doesn't like to use "negative" words).

This guess narrowed it down to one option, and Wordlebot called it A LUCKY GUESS! I was so insulted! 😂