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I wrote this program for doing my vertigo exercises.

ruby -e '5.times {%w(left center right center).each{`say #{_1}`;sleep 30}};`say exercise over`'


Yeah, you can think of it as a percentage. The min is 1 and the max is 99. It could be 100, but I don't trust my mostly untested side project that much, so I cut it off at 99 :)

The base confidence score is determined based on how many words a guess technically could be, that's here - https://github.com/mattruzicka/wordle_decoder/blob/0bfd7eaac...

Then, I sort of just willy nilly add/subtract from that based on the "intrinsic" score of the word which is computed here - https://github.com/mattruzicka/wordle_decoder/blob/0bfd7eaac... and then the "contextualized" score AKA how well it works with other words, which is computed here - https://github.com/mattruzicka/wordle_decoder/blob/0bfd7eaac...


Ha, I built a crosswordle solver and didn't even know it!


appreciate both of you turning this question into practical app! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30569209


I’m not the author of crosswordle, just a fan!


I honestly thought I removed those comments lol. They might be a little outdated, but yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about what kinds of information I could glean. There's definitely some bias in there towards a certain kind of strategy/play.

I like your project, very creative!


Looking at the parent run, my first thought was that its initial guess is a relatively uncommon word and is (I assume) probably not a very good choice as an initial guess. There are various lists of the best starting words in order going around. I wonder if you could get to the best results by picking the highest ranked word consistent with the other lines?


I thought about using lists like that, but it felt a little too much like cheating. My attempt at something like this is, if the word is one of your first two guesses, I reward it for having more common letters. And actually penalize common letter "misses" in later lines. I'm sure it's not 100% optimal, but I saw some improvement on my admittedly very limited set of test data. Here's the relevant code - https://github.com/mattruzicka/wordle_decoder/blob/0bfd7eaac...


Of course, doing what I wrote also makes the assumption that the person playing is using one of the top 10 (or whatever) starting words which may or may not be correct.

That aside, I started playing a 6 letter variant and, while I haven't done any sort of analysis with access to the word list, I did do a quick Word Hippo analysis of words with common letters, especially vowels, and while I'm sure my results aren't optimal they're probably pretty good.

ADDED: Which I think is probably not all that different from what your code is doing. I fed Word Hippo 4 or 5 letters and told it to come up with some common words.

But that still requires an assumption that a player has given some thought to good starting guesses.


Ah, that "_1" numbered parameter syntax was added in Ruby 2.7

I actually hadn't used that syntax before this project, was interested in trying it out. I'll document that it only works with 2.7 or later.


Ha, it ended up taking a bit more time than I thought it would, but once I started I couldn't stop.


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