Wordle Solver

This page helps solve wordle puzzles.

The solution is based on the idea of Shannon entropy. A solution dictionary is a set of possible solutions that Wordle might choose. Each answer from wordle cuts down the size of that set by eliminating possible solutions, resulting in a solution set.

A player may select from a set of allowable guesses. This is not the same as the initial solution dictionary. The NYT permits guesses to be obscure words never used as solutions. 6-character Lewdle permits 5 and 6 letter guesses. And a player may choose "hard mode", where the next guess must match all previous answers, resulting in a much smaller set of allowable guesses.

Each potential next guess partitions the solution set into subsets, according to what green/yellow/gray pattern that next guess would give for each possible solution.

The "entropy", the "uncertainty" of each subset is proportional to the log of the size of the subset. We usually use log base 2 to give an uncertainty measured in bits. A subset with only one possible solution has the minimum value of zero - no uncertainty, a definite answer. A subset more potential solutions has a greater uncertainty.

For a given potential next guess, the important value is the "expected uncertainty". This is a weighted average - the uncertainty of each subset multiplied by the probability of the solution being in that subset. It means "if you used this guess as your next guess, you would probably still need this amount of information to solve the wordle."

The best possible result is when each subset has a size of 1, and an uncertainty of 0. This means that this potential next guess completely distinguishes between all possible answers and will definitely give a win on the next turn.

The lewdle dictionary is possibly not quite right. This means that the solver may suggest guesses that are not valid words. If lewdle won't accept the best guess, try one of the other suggested guesses.

Maybe it's cheating to load the dictionaries, but computing "solve over the space of all possible 5-letter sequences" would take forever, and anyway that's not what humans do.

TBH: The main purpose of this page is not to solve Wordle, but to fool about with rxjs.