5 ms·

I wrote a script that finds the word that gives the smallest average number of possibilities left (across all possible actual solutions) and came up with "raise

I wrote a script that finds the word that gives the smallest average number of possibilities left (across all possible actual solutions) and came up with "raise". "cloth" is often a good second word, but it depends of course.

capitainenemo 5y ago
raise and arise aren't too bad (and atone with traditional "etoain shrdlu") but my suspicion based on: grep -P '^[a-z]{5}$' /usr/share/dict/words | sed 's/$.$/\1\n/g' | grep -Pv '^\s$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | xargs 42 q 70 j 89 x 97 z 261 v 418 w 445 f 480 k 549 g 557 b 636 y 646 h 647 m 757 p 793 c 828 u 990 d 1027 n 1266 t 1268 i 1305 l 1468 o 1488 r 1848 a 2443 e 2552 s and: $ grep -P '^[a-z]{5}$' /usr/share/dict/words | sed 's/$.$/\1\n/g' | grep -Pv '^\s$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -n 10 | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs | rev s e a r o l i t n d for a bit more readability, is that "arose" is a better starting word for 5 letter english words. That said, the difference between the i and the o is not large, so both probably work well.
- oezi 5y ago
  I often struggle to find a matching second word when I start with soare or raise. I wonder if somebody did try to optimize for a first word that makes it easy to come up with a second quess statistically.
  - mortehu 5y ago
    In a way it's supposed to be hard, because there will often be only a handful of options left.
- mortehu 5y ago
  I took into account the position constraints you learn from the game after entering the word too. This is why "raise" beats "arise" for example.
  - capitainenemo 5y ago
    oh. that's an excellent point. I hadn't thought about that. right letter wrong place is far less useful than right letter right place.
    - capitainenemo 5y ago
      hm. again I don't know what dictionary he's using, but using /usr/share/dict/words and some more shell I get: 1st: 303 t 305 p 343 b 370 c 629 s 2nd: 404 u 511 e 530 i 699 o 758 a 3rd: 325 n 370 r 405 o 444 i 515 a 4th: 253 a 299 l 313 n 358 t 1013 e 5th: 291 t 394 d 472 y 495 e 1506 s So.. I guess unsurprisingly ending a word in "es" is the way to go and an "a" is 2nd is pretty good closely followed by "o" With those values "cares" or "bares" seems like a better bet? It gets you that popular r in 3rd, and the ending es...
    - mortehu 5y ago
      > right letter wrong place is far less useful than right letter right place It's not that easy. If you're guessing the most common position for a letter, you may not be gaining the maximum amount of information. The heuristics approach you're using won't beat brute force evaluation of all possible guesses for all possible solutions (which is only a few million combinations).
      - capitainenemo 5y ago
        Well, part of the goal is also to finish in less than 6 guesses, so surely an optimal starting pattern is best. And since you can't do better than each letter being unique, you might as well ensure those unique letters are both common and ideally positioned. From that point on, the remaining words I guess you could brute force, or combine statistical with statistical to cover best letters first. I'm sure brute forcing will probably guarantee a win almost always, but will it be, for example a 3 or 4 word win which is pretty easy to do for a human.
- readthenotes1 5y ago
  Doing a similar analysis on the enable2k word list comes up with a slightly different order: s e a o r i l t n d
  - readthenotes1 5y ago
    And with the actual word list from the game, e a r o t l i s n c

capitainenemo 5y ago

raise and arise aren't too bad (and atone with traditional "etoain shrdlu") but my suspicion based on: grep -P '^[a-z]{5}$' /usr/share/dict/words | sed 's/$.$/\1\n/g' | grep -Pv '^\s$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | xargs 42 q 70 j 89 x 97 z 261 v 418 w 445 f 480 k 549 g 557 b 636 y 646 h 647 m 757 p 793 c 828 u 990 d 1027 n 1266 t 1268 i 1305 l 1468 o 1488 r 1848 a 2443 e 2552 s and: $ grep -P '^[a-z]{5}$' /usr/share/dict/words | sed 's/$.$/\1\n/g' | grep -Pv '^\s$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -n 10 | awk '{print $NF}' | xargs | rev s e a r o l i t n d for a bit more readability, is that "arose" is a better starting word for 5 letter english words. That said, the difference between the i and the o is not large, so both probably work well.

oezi 5y ago
I often struggle to find a matching second word when I start with soare or raise. I wonder if somebody did try to optimize for a first word that makes it easy to come up with a second quess statistically.
- mortehu 5y ago
  In a way it's supposed to be hard, because there will often be only a handful of options left.
mortehu 5y ago
I took into account the position constraints you learn from the game after entering the word too. This is why "raise" beats "arise" for example.
- capitainenemo 5y ago
  oh. that's an excellent point. I hadn't thought about that. right letter wrong place is far less useful than right letter right place.
  - capitainenemo 5y ago
    hm. again I don't know what dictionary he's using, but using /usr/share/dict/words and some more shell I get: 1st: 303 t 305 p 343 b 370 c 629 s 2nd: 404 u 511 e 530 i 699 o 758 a 3rd: 325 n 370 r 405 o 444 i 515 a 4th: 253 a 299 l 313 n 358 t 1013 e 5th: 291 t 394 d 472 y 495 e 1506 s So.. I guess unsurprisingly ending a word in "es" is the way to go and an "a" is 2nd is pretty good closely followed by "o" With those values "cares" or "bares" seems like a better bet? It gets you that popular r in 3rd, and the ending es...
  - mortehu 5y ago
    > right letter wrong place is far less useful than right letter right place It's not that easy. If you're guessing the most common position for a letter, you may not be gaining the maximum amount of information. The heuristics approach you're using won't beat brute force evaluation of all possible guesses for all possible solutions (which is only a few million combinations).
    - capitainenemo 5y ago
      Well, part of the goal is also to finish in less than 6 guesses, so surely an optimal starting pattern is best. And since you can't do better than each letter being unique, you might as well ensure those unique letters are both common and ideally positioned. From that point on, the remaining words I guess you could brute force, or combine statistical with statistical to cover best letters first. I'm sure brute forcing will probably guarantee a win almost always, but will it be, for example a 3 or 4 word win which is pretty easy to do for a human.
readthenotes1 5y ago
Doing a similar analysis on the enable2k word list comes up with a slightly different order: s e a o r i l t n d
- readthenotes1 5y ago
  And with the actual word list from the game, e a r o t l i s n c