Just like Pet Rocks, Tamagotchis, Candy Crush, and 2048, Wordle has become a craze which will rise and fall and will be over within six months and then leave a hard core of fans.
What is Wordle? Wordle is a word game about words where you must guess a series of words before you get to the Worldle word and win Wordle. Some people have likened it to the board game Mastermind or perhaps the very old TV game show Password but unlike those things, Wordle is more of a chance to show off how quickly that you solved it by sharing it on Twitbook, Facegram and Instatok.
Young people think that this game is hip and edgy; old people think that it makes them look smart and refined. I think that its a relatively simple exercise in logic; which can always be solved in four moves because the English language follows unwritten rules which also affect how consonants and vowels interact with each other.
The basic premise of the game is that you get six attempts to guess a five letter word. The game then informs you if you have any of the letters right and whether or not you have any letters in the right spot. From here, it is just a matter of using the information that you have been given to arrive at the answer.
I have it on good authority that the average number of attempts to get any given words right, is 4.83. This is actually sort of skewed as the game never counts anything beyond six attempts. This means that the majority of the time, people are getting the correct answer on either the second last or last try. Naturally when I saw this game, I wanted to invent a strategy to beat everyone and so I decided that the first three moves of Wordle should always be:
THING
ABOUT
CAKES
The reason for this is that these three words contain all of the vowels. Rather, these three words contain all of the glyphs that we commonly call vowels. There aren't many words that do not contain the vowel glyphs and those that do, like "rhythm" or "gym", contain 'y' which takes the place of a short 'i' sound which is still a vowel.
If you ignore the meat and bones that make up humans, and also ignore the cushion shaped bag of thought meat in someone's skull, then the other interesting things about humans are the system of bellows, reeds, and valvework which humans use to make useful communicative sounds.
There are about 15 actual vowels employed by the English language but by accident of space and time and history, English chooses to employ five and half glyphs to represent the vowels. Vowels are basically the result of air being bellowed through the reeds and then through the valvework, which then changes the tonal quality and timbre of them.
Consonants on the other hand are what happens when that bellowed air hits the valve work and is interrupted in different ways. There are plosive, dental, fricative etc. consonants and even then, English glyphs are inadequate to describe the diphthongs such as 'ng', 'th' 'ch' etc.
All of this taken together means that all words much contain vowels; so getting them out of the way in a hurry is the quickest way to sort through all of the dross.
When it comes to the consonants, the English language likes using: t, r, s, d, l, n and g the most. Alfred Mosher Butts who invented the board game Scrabble (no, I did not make that up), allegedly went through a a bunch of newspaper including the New York Times and counted the incidence of all the letters used and then assigned distributions and point values based on the relative frequency of all the letters. I suspect that S is deliberately underrepresented in Scrabble because that makes the game more fun.
These three words contain all of the vowels as well as most of the common consonants; which means that with these three sieves, you should be able to shake out what is and is not hidden in the game. Truth be told, 'THING ABOUT CAKES' probably isn't the most efficient method of eliminating the common letters but it isn't bad. 'THING ABOUT DARES' is more efficient but less fun. Why shouldn't every word game be about cakes? I will go so far as to say that if this thing was printed in the newspaper, it would be played by lots of people with a cup of tea/coffee as well as a bikkie or piece of cake.
That's just the beginning of it. There are some combinations of letters such as the diphthongs which always appear in concert. 'nd' will appear at the ends of words but almost never at the beginning and 'e' has a fun power which makes it the second last letter in many words because it appears in terminal suffixes like 'er', 'ed', 'es'. There is also a weak tendency for the vowels to appear in alphabetical order as you progress down a word. You need to analyse a sample size of words of at least 100,000 words before this becomes apparent.
By applying a little bit of logic to this game, of the now 50 games that I have played, I have solved 50; with 47 being on attempt 4, 2 on attempt 5 and 1 on attempt 6. This give me an average of 4.08 as opposed to 4.83. That's roughly 15% better than what I suspect are people's undefined strategies.
However, this leads me to an hypothesis. I suspect that people have already subconsciously absorbed a whole bunch of rules to do with how consonants and vowels interact with each other. We as collections of meat and bones with bellows and valve work, have to make sense of the world and that includes the language that we speak. Wordle itself is a game which exists within the Anglophone world and would probably be nigh on impossible in a symbolic character language like Chinese or the syllabaries of Korea and Japan. It might work in Urdu or Arabic scripts and it might work with Cyrillic scripts but that is not for me to say.
Probably the hard core Scrabble players and the players of TV games like Countdown (aka Letters and Numbers) should be better at this game than I because they've also gone to the effort of memorising thousands or words; whereas I haven't actively done that. I just have a few strategies which work marginally better than the majority of the population.
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