Wordle Assistant – preliminary version.
A lot of my friends on social media are playing Wordle! Wordle is a game where the users have to guess a fairly common 5 letter word in 6 attempts. Although the fun is in guessing the word, there is no harm in getting a little assistance, isn’t it? So I made a Wordle assistant, uncouth but still suggests possible words to try on Wordle. In this blog post, I would mention the boring stuff and how you can possibly use it.
The aim of the program is to not replace the user, but to assist the user with suggestions!
But first, the boring stuff…
The Wordle Assistant is mildly intelligent. It has a notebook interface and if you are not a developer, you might find it unfriendly to use, especially when the world around uses Alexa and Siri! In case you want to collaborate and make it friendlier, please send me an email?
Data: I gathered a dataset of 5-lettered words from multiple sources which include this and the word list on the Wordle site. However, on Google Colab Notebook, you would find only the Wordle list right now.
Suggestion logic: Based on the dataset, the Wordle Assistant calculates how popular letters are and suggests words that are very likely to either figure out which letters exist in the secret word OR exclude a considerable chunk of words from further consideration.
Modes: There are two modes in which this Wordle Assistant can operate.
- Default mode: The next suggestion considers the previously discovered alphabets in the secret word.
- Explore mode: The next suggestion ignores previously used alphabets completely.
There are several articles on the internet to tell you how to play the game. It is confusing! This is what I consider:
- The first entry should reveal as much as possible. We can try words like “adieu”, “audio” because they have a lot of vowels. We can also try “stern”, “crane” which has vowels and also other letters which are frequently used like “s” and “t”. I use “arise” or “arose” because based on the dataset that I use, that’s the combination of popular letters!
- The assistant would then suggest a maximum of 4 possible words to try. You can choose the number of options you want to choose from. In case you are confused, maybe try the first suggested word in the list. In case if you think that one of the words in the list is significantly more popular than the others, please use that word.
- In case you have solved the Wordle and want to stop the program from executing, please enter “stop”.
About Explore Mode:
- If you decide to use it, maybe try it only for once.
- It is likely that if it is used more than once, it would be turned off because it would have exhausted all options and the program would terminate abruptly.
- In case you are confused which word to use, please use the first entry.
How to enter the sequences to get suggestions?
Once you enter a word on Wordle, for each alphabet you would get one of the three colors: Black, Yellow, Green. To let the program know that an alphabet is marked yellow, please use “?” after the alphabet. Use “!” to tell that it is green. In case it is marked black, just let that be! Credit: I got this idea from this website.
Where can you play with the code? This is the link to the Google Colab Notebook. Once you click on it, it would open on the next tab. On the options, please click on “Runtime” and “Run All”. In the end, some instructions will come. Please follow the instructions.
Let’s watch a video to understand the playing part properly and in case you have read through the text, it is revision time!
Limitations and future work:
- The list of 5 letter words needs to be more exhaustive if people want to use it to play Wordle like games on their mobile phone.
- Maybe scraping Wikipedia, extracting 5 letter words from there to figure out which ones are more frequently used might help in suggesting words better.
- There is a small bug in the code. If an alphabet appears just once on the secret word, the program might suggest words where the alphabet appears more than once.
- Yea, the code does not have a shape or body. If you are into UI and wants to collaborate, please get in touch?