Solving Wordle using information theory
An excuse to teach a lesson on information theory and entropy.
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Contents:
0:00 - What is Wordle?
2:43 - Initial ideas
8:04 - Information theory basics
18:15 - Incorporating word frequencies
27:49 - Final performance
Original wordle site:
www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
Music by Vincent Rubinetti.
www.vincentrubinetti.com/
Shannon and von Neumann artwork by Kurt Bruns.
/ czprkhmjnd6
Code for this video:
github.com/3b1b/videos/tree/m...
These animations are largely made using a custom python library, manim. See the FAQ comments here:
www.3blue1brown.com/faq#manim
github.com/3b1b/manim
github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/
You can find code for specific videos and projects here:
github.com/3b1b/videos/
Thanks to these viewers for their contributions to translations
German: Thadaeus, styrix560, wolfsgier
------------------
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Imagine Grant's friend innocently telling him that his Wordle opener was "weary", only for him to publish a 30-minute essay on why that's stupid a week later😅
making this video is just an excuse to prove his friend is stupid mathematically lol
To be fair, the friend did have the best possible explanation for it. They maximized expected joy rather than information.
the Gospel: the Gospel isn't solely "Jesus loves you and He can do this, this, and that for you." no, the true Biblical Gospel is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of a holy and just God, and because of this we all deserve death and eternal damnation in hell. our sins have separated us from God and when we were separated from God, we were sold as slaves to sin, under the captivity and care of the devil, whom we love(d). in our sinful nature, we're nothing more than wretched, vile sinners in DIRE need of the Savior, but JESUS, the perfect and sinless Lamb of God, came into the world and took the punishment we deserved for our wicked sins and was raised from the dead three days after being buried so that we may have the opportunity of salvation, redemption, adoption, and reconciliation to the Heavenly Father. we ought to repent and believe in the Gospel of our LORD Jesus Christ; we must be born-again. (Mark 8:36,37) (John 3:16), (Acts 17:30), (Romans 6:23), (John 3:5), (Ecclesiastes 12:13), (Mark 1:15).
@@teeforever1 wat
His friend is probably pretty awesome
creating an algorithm for this and comparing them against each other sounds like it would have made a great programming competition
I was thinking the same! In fact I actually was researching for a hash table for all 5 letter words and was going to start my algo.
well, a bit further from wordle, with the same intent, there's the Hutter prize
Polygon already did it
the fact that such a competition would be possible tells us that the use of "optimal" in the title is incorrect. :P that being said, that competition would be interesting!
@@tiagoaoa I think for this reason a competition would not be interesting. As far as I can tell the algorithm is optimal for the objective it defines (which is slightly modified from the original puzzle but only for greater generality)
The position of letters is a factor. For example, I prefer TALES over SALET ( SALET is recommended by others who have done computer analysis of this game) because if I do NOT get a green S, then that rules out a huge number of plural four-letter nouns with an S on the end, like BOOMS. Note that I am getting a lot of information out an absence of a match there. Though Y is a fairly rare letter, it turns up at the end of a lot of five-letter words. Letters like L, R and H are important beyond their commonness because they often combine with other consonants as in BLAND, PROSE, and CHAIR.
the word is never a plural fyi
@@figgahh5823 Oh really? It accepts guesses of plurals, such as NAILS which is used as an example in this video. Good to know, thanks.
Lindybeige no worries! I only found out yesterday too
I have also thought about not only the letters of your first word but the placement. I either use 'STERN' or 'RENTS.' Since 'rents' ends in S, it will rule out most plural words. But then I think that plural words don't tend to be the words used in Wordle. So I usually just go with 'stern.'
@@lindybeige Maybe it rejects "nails" if you enter it as the plural of nail, but it accepts it if you enter "nails" as the past tense of the verb "nail"? ;-)
Never have I ever been tricked into enjoying a math class like this. I wish I had you instead of all my college professors
I mean I'm sure he had to go through what you did to get to the fun things he does now.
@@malachiduncan6104 this, also learning anything you don’t wanna learn will ALWAYS be worse than something you are motivated to do.
Hear, Hear.
@@malachiduncan6104oh i heard the lecture about information theory. And you can teach all of this real boring
Interesting video, real good stuff. Gonna keep using PENIS but this was really cool and informative!
🤣🤣🤣
gold
Same but FARTS
Lmao
You might like Lewdle, the lewd version. (Penis is my first guess on it every day)
Grant: “this video’s getting kinda long.” Me: “what are we at, like 10? 15 minutes? He’s got plenty of time!” Me after checking clock: “oh…”
Hi alpha I love your videos huge science fan!
Pros watch at 2x speed
@@imbw267 nah 1x. I want to appreciate it in its entirety
I knew it was a 30 min video when it started. Couldn't believe it was already over.
ngl I did the same thing with the speed of motion
Just realised WORDLE now has a "hard mode" where you MUST use existing information in future guesses (i.e. if you get a green first letter and yellow fourth letter, future guesses HAVE to start with that same first letter and mix that other letter around). Curious how this would affect the amount of information obtained at each guess, particularly with an algorithm looking ahead multiple guesses.
I've lost only a couple times; once because I got the last 4 letters, but there were more possibilities for the first letter than I had guesses left. that would be a case to use a word that doesn't include the results from previous guesses.
?. SZwa*=+
he has that at the end of the vid
he does a zip on the guesses and patterns, look at the source code: if hard_mode: for guess, pattern in zip(guesses, patterns): choices = get_possible_words(guess, pattern, choices)
Oh. That's just how I've been playing normally...
The amount of preparation work in order to produce a video like this is unbelievable.. truly impressive work.
4:00 note that the list used in Wordle is the exact list of words allowed in international tournament Scrabble. It's called CSW19.
I believe that the original list had all available scrabble five letter words, but the coder's partner went through and took out all the truly ridiculous and obscure ones
sounds like a virus
@@helenross3037 The allowed words list is the full list. The possible answers is the curated by the partner list.
@@helenross3037 Threw out 10,000 words.... yet kept American spellings of words despite being British. Pfft... snowflakes
@@trefwoordpunk2225 Isn't Scrabble (or at least Scrabble tournaments) US centric? I feel like it's more likely the Scrabble tournament people removed those words
I love those sketches you put in when depicting real life situations, like the conversation between Von Neumann and Shannon 12:01!
I love how the sketch showed up as I read your comment
The art takes a fascinating discussion to the next level. Well done.
But how are they done? Looks almost like made from 2D Fourier Transform curves
@@shoam2103 what about the drawing made it seem that way?
Timestamp comments like this!
A year later and my blind devotion to your original video has paid off. Thank you kindly!
All Greens.
I guessed crane time since I saw this video, I never thought the day would finally come
What do we start with now?
I watched this only a week or so before adopting it and it being correct on the first guess.
This video is so well done. The word play at 18:40, the hidden messages in the game at 25:25... This video gives me "Gödel, Escher, Bach" vibes, and that is something that has never happened to me since I read that book. Awesome.
Possibly fun fact: GEB is why I'm an atheist.
@@Oberon4278 cringe alert
@@hackkitts9254why ?
@@Oberon4278reductionism only gets you so far
@@Oberon4278what argument convinced you?
18:38 I bet you had a lot of fun writing that bit
Hello
That's two different KZheadrs that I've been watching recently that have commented on this video. (You and AlphaPhoenix.) I love that!
I come to the comments to write this and see my boy bismuth beating me to the punch
I spit out my tea at "Where those after first are after, where and those, being just a little bit less common."
These nuts haha gotem. Someone end me pls.
thanks for making this. now people will stop asking me to make this video, lol
Lol, would still appreciate your take! Thanks jan
People still won’t stop asking you, lets be honest.
You’re contractually obligated to remake this video in toki pona using seximal notation.
Do the same thing but instead of the bit, you have -log base 6 of p(x).
@@Anonymous-df8it You mean -log base 10 of 1/p(x), right?
On Jun 21, 2023 I put down the word CRANE and to my amazement, it was the word of the day! Its the only word I got on my first try
I could've never had forgiven my self had I not played Wordle today. Been using crane since this video came about.
Came here for this, was not disappointed.
Also I believe NYT has updated the Wordle words list, would love to see an updated video with the latest best starter.
@@lpeabody yeah idk if it's public though?
@jonaslarsson5279 it might be the the source code somewhere
Came for the wordle, stayed for the awesome lesson on information theory. Cool!
love your videos!
Your playlist on discrete math is up next on my list...
Professor Bazett! You were my professor while I was at UofT and just wanted to say you were hands down one of the best math teachers I've had, I still remember your infectious enthusiasm for the topic
@@edwardsulitzer3738 hey cool! Small internet lol
the Gospel: the Gospel isn't solely "Jesus loves you and He can do this, this, and that for you." no, the true Biblical Gospel is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of a holy and just God, and because of this we all deserve death and eternal damnation in hell. our sins have separated us from God and when we were separated from God, we were sold as slaves to sin, under the captivity and care of the devil, whom we love(d). in our sinful nature, we're nothing more than wretched, vile sinners in DIRE need of the Savior, but JESUS, the perfect and sinless Lamb of God, came into the world and took the punishment we deserved for our wicked sins and was raised from the dead three days after being buried so that we may have the opportunity of salvation, redemption, adoption, and reconciliation to the Heavenly Father. we ought to repent and believe in the Gospel of our LORD Jesus Christ; we must be born-again. (Mark 8:36,37) (John 3:16), (Acts 17:30), (Romans 6:23), (John 3:5), (Ecclesiastes 12:13), (Mark 1:15).
"we shouldn't let machines rule our lives" -the man writing and using a wordle bot Love the video!
HAHAHA I was going to bring that up. Super funny.
Funny if you take it the wrong way yeah but the meaning of that saying is to not blindly follow a machine's decision, which is exactly what he's doing by taking into account the bot suggestion but ultimately making his own choice with what info he has available aka the word list and his personal preference.
I know what it means, Corne, lol
After 512 days, crane has finally won first try. Thank you
This video is why I got my first 1/6 score today 😁😁😁
I also was here for that
No spoilers 😂
I used crane today. Got it on first word.
Lol
Coming in with the -4 (WordleBot did it in 5 that day)
"Ignoring its recommendation, because we can't let machines rule our lives" I love this!!!
L
Yesss, I laughed out loud at this part too!
Tares is a verb! "He tares the scale". It means setting a scale to zero with something on it. That way you can weigh something in a container without weighing the container! You use it a lot in chemistry.
Fun fact: (not Fun at all actually) in portuguese its "tara", but the word for "pervert" is "tarado", where -do is a suffix, meaning "perversion" is "tara" as well
@@joaomatheus6222 How interesting! I looked up the etymology of "tare", to see if it might explain why "tara" has two different meanings in Portuguese. I found that the medieval Latin word "tara" comes from the Arabic word "tarah", meaning "thing deducted or rejected, that which is thrown away", which is derived from "taraha", meaning "to reject". Perhaps perversion became associated with rejection at some point in the history of the Portuguese language.
the Gospel: the Gospel isn't solely "Jesus loves you and He can do this, this, and that for you." no, the true Biblical Gospel is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of a holy and just God, and because of this we all deserve death and eternal damnation in hell. our sins have separated us from God and when we were separated from God, we were sold as slaves to sin, under the captivity and care of the devil, whom we love(d). in our sinful nature, we're nothing more than wretched, vile sinners in DIRE need of the Savior, but JESUS, the perfect and sinless Lamb of God, came into the world and took the punishment we deserved for our wicked sins and was raised from the dead three days after being buried so that we may have the opportunity of salvation, redemption, adoption, and reconciliation to the Heavenly Father. we ought to repent and believe in the Gospel of our LORD Jesus Christ; we must be born-again. (Mark 8:36,37) (John 3:16), (Acts 17:30), (Romans 6:23), (John 3:5), (Ecclesiastes 12:13), (Mark 1:15).
@@MelodiousThunk I suspect you are on the money about that. In Spanish we also have the verb "tarar": to set a scale to zero. Also we have a "tarado" (male) and "tarada" (female) but it translates as stupid or idiot. In fact, it's a participle. It's like saying "tared": The scale was tared // La balanza fue tarada. I wouldn't be surprise if your explanation is also valid for Spanish. Just remember the complex history Spain and Portugal have with each other. Specially during the Al Andalus times.
I always wondered why the scales I use to brew my coffee had a "T" written on the button that zeroes the scales 😂
I adore your teaching style of gradually building upon simple intuitions until you've reached a rigorous and useful conclusion. It makes so many subjects easier to understand and I hope I get to use it someday
Today is a momentous occasion - the word IS **CRANE** today! Happy 1-shot day to a lot of people.
This reminds me of "mastermind" a game of the early 70's. In stead of words you have 4 different colored pins. And for the error/success feedback there is two pins in black and white. It is played by two people where one player is the guesser and the other one checks the guess and gives feedback.
played it, loved it
Actually I wrote an algorithm to play mastermind using this exact approach!
I thought I was the only one compare it to that game
was thinking the same thing!
i still have that board game!!
You deserve the world. The amount of effort that went into making those smooth slick animations, the wordle UI to run simulations on, the code that you wrote is IMMEDIATELY apparent. Production quality is off the charts as always, and the video is filled to the brim with information, pun intented. Keep up the good work, you are amazing!
I came to say this. It is, most likely, the best presentation I have ever witnessed.
Really cool presentation. Laughed at the words Crane and Shtik when they came out. Reminds me of a thing I saw a few days ago called joincrane.
He deserves the wordl(e)
I LOVE THIS!! Made a Wordle solver myself before seeing this video, but the level of maths you’re using here and the knowledge you need to pull it off THIS way is just incredible. 3B1B, that’s another score there. Thanks for this vid! 🙏
Finally after using crane as my opening for a year, I'm so grateful i didnt miss wordle 732!
As an information theorist (a PhD student working on the field), I am amazed by this video. It is so interesting and well-organized. The information i(x) = -log2(p(x)) is also called "surprisal". I like this terminology a lot, because, really, the larger i(x) is, the more you get surprized by the outcome x.
I like that.
why use he log base 2?? bcs always we cant get half observation in my space of probabilities
18:39-18:58 I love this paragraph! Love this wordplay, brings back VSauce memories!
I really liked it as well :)
Yea, brillaint stuff
That part made me smile. You could tell he was having fun with it :)
Grant is a fucking genius lmao
Reminds me a of CGP Grey video personally with the wordplay and semi-rhythmic nature
This video has finally fulfilled its purpose
I like to start with “Faint”, which is usually followed by “Ouphe”, and they both remove vowels (excluding “Y”), and I usually end up with enough info to finish the word, but if I do not, then I follow up with “Byrls”. Which removes “Y” and four extra, fairly common letters. This strategy will usually get you the letters by the fourth guess. The strategy I used to follow was a “House” “Paint” combo, and after a while I felt like I could get more efficient and swapped to “Faint, Ouphe, Byrls”.
the issue is that you will never get the word in two or three guesses like that, so it maximizes your chances of winning but not your score
you can always do: GLENT BRICK JUMPY VOZHD WAQFS this eliminates 25/26 letters and just leaves X
I'm with you, find the vowels first ...
@@treverfox1280 Doesn't work if your Wordle requires entering only guesses that are words, like cell phone Wordle from Lion Studios Plus. Also fails for goal words requiring trial and error, like batch/match/patch/watch/hatch/latch/catch, which can't be reliably guessed even if all six lines were used.
'I like to start with “Faint” ' Not optimal, because the consonant F is not a frequent one. Saint would be better, and including E in the first word would be best.
The most useful and enlightening definition of entropy I've ever encountered came from neuroscientist Terrence Deacon, who frames it as the dissipation of constraints. Anything at maximum entropy is maximally UN-constrained. Be it energy levels in the statistical distribution of particles in an ideal gas (Boltzmann) or the resolution of uncertainty in the answer of any given question (Shannon). It also helps to frame how entropy doesn't simply rely on the contents of a container (2 black, and 2 red checkers on a 2 x 2 checker board, for example) but the possibility space conferred onto those arrangements by the SIZE of the container (considerably larger if those same checker pieces end up transposed onto a standard 8 x 8 board). Constraints man, they're big time (gravity vs. Inflation being my all time fav example).
The definition that I use (I think I got it from PBS Space Time) is a measure of how much *unknown* information - according to certain defined properties like particle position/velocity, quantum properties, etc. - is present in a given system. Deacon's definition is definitely more concise though!
@@aaron552au sussy
What the heck is happening here 😭
Compound Pivot. Dead Hands. Finesse Swing. 730, 900, 1030 swings. Makes complete sense @David
the Gospel: the Gospel isn't solely "Jesus loves you and He can do this, this, and that for you." no, the true Biblical Gospel is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of a holy and just God, and because of this we all deserve death and eternal damnation in hell. our sins have separated us from God and when we were separated from God, we were sold as slaves to sin, under the captivity and care of the devil, whom we love(d). in our sinful nature, we're nothing more than wretched, vile sinners in DIRE need of the Savior, but JESUS, the perfect and sinless Lamb of God, came into the world and took the punishment we deserved for our wicked sins and was raised from the dead three days after being buried so that we may have the opportunity of salvation, redemption, adoption, and reconciliation to the Heavenly Father. we ought to repent and believe in the Gospel of our LORD Jesus Christ; we must be born-again. (Mark 8:36,37) (John 3:16), (Acts 17:30), (Romans 6:23), (John 3:5), (Ecclesiastes 12:13), (Mark 1:15).
I love how you opened with the idea that "4 guesses is par and 3 guesses is birdie", then in your comment at the end (29:26) you note that consistently getting 3 guesses is basically impossible. That's so cool how the math matches our human intuition about the puzzle!
I think it is experience rather than intuition
@@koktszfung Isn't most of intuition simply what you expect based on experience? 😛
@@koktszfung Intuition is experience-driven
@@koktszfung You got schooled in the comments.
oh I thought he said 3 was dirty, as in you're using outside info or likely cheating. continuing the golf terms make more sense lol
Thanks for making and sharing more exciting math content like this; you're doing really great to make them so interesting!
Well today's word was CRANE. Have to give this the award for best thumbnail ever
You ever watch a video that's so good you actually watch the end screen
More like "you ever watch a video that is too long you actually SKIP to the end screen" 😅 Yeah no way am I sticking around for 30 minutes trying to get info on the best start word to use.
@@AzureSteel why would you look to an in-depth mathematics channel for wordle tips?
Wait Cheetahh. Lol. Holy crap. Weird to find a bridge player here lol
@@dogmouthhorse Pretty sure this video was recommended to me (and probably to a lot of other people given the views this has relative to his other videos in the past year) through YT's algorithm because of the recent Wordle hype.
@@AzureSteel The word is in the thumbnail, if you don't like math this was an easy skip lmao
(18:46) Just brilliant! ‘FIRST is “which” after WHICH THERE's “their” and “there.” “First” itself is not FIRST but ninth, and it makes sense that THESE OTHER words COULD come ABOUT more often. WHERE those AFTER first are “after,” “where,” and “those,” ... BEING just a little bit less common.’
I also thought that was brilliant. Such awesome word play and creativity for such a small moment
As soon as I heard it I looked for this comment
@@shibno01 same lol
I thought I was having a neurological event.
WHOSE on FIRST?
Today, I thank you.
I know you came back later and decided that you miscalculated and this wasn't the best opener. But I've been using it anyway, and I can tell you that *today* it's the best opener!
This video is so good and the fact that you implemented and did affort to basically have any visual / stasttical point of view to any version of solver is just incredible
This 30 minute video taught me more about entropy than an entire section on entropy from my machine learning course. Bravo!
reducible has some pretty good videos on it, especially the compression video. He uses grant's library, so they look like 3b1b but instead of a focus on math, it's on cs.
Honestly, machine learning is really not the best context to get an intuitive understanding of entropy.
Machine learning in IMHO is a wrong introduction for Information Theory. Shannon's paper "A mathematical theory of Communication" and Hamming's Paper on Error correction and Detection are really worth reading and easily approachable in few sitting.
Same. I learn more maths, better maths in a few 3b1b videos than I do at school
All of us crane openers got it in 1 today
I have religiously been using crane since I saw this video, TODAYS OUR DAY GUYS!!!!!🎉
Awesome breakdown as usual. I'm surprised you didn't comment more about the effect of "hard mode" and the reduction in information available when you need to reuse correct information.
I would love to see a follow-up with hard mode considered.
I wonder if looking ahead at the next guess is all you really need for hard mode.
@@rantingrodent416 definitely gotta look ahead at more than one guess; it's easy to get stuck with 4 letters solved and 4-5 options for the last letter and if you don't have enough guesses left...
Am I the only one that finds hard mode easier?
@@AntonioDoukas hardmode is definitely harder, so I assume you are. if you get stuck on a word with 4 greens and one grey, that could have several possibilities for the last one, you're boned
Edit: For more details on how the "best" opener was chosen, and why there was a slight mistake here such that CRANE actually drops to #6, see the follow-on video kzhead.info/sun/mbaelJSQpJVoip8/bejne.html For a human playing Wordle, I'm not sure I'd actually recommend starting with CRANE, or any of the ones best for one of these algorithms, since it requires also knowing what it will do for second guesses. For example, here's the start of the mapping for what it does with that second guess: ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ -> sloth ⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛ -> toils ⬛⬛⬛⬛🟨 -> spilt ⬛🟨⬛⬛🟨 -> rosit ⬛⬛⬛⬛🟩 -> toils ⬛🟨⬛⬛⬛ -> shout ⬛🟨🟨⬛⬛ -> party ⬛⬛⬛🟩⬛ -> gluts ⬛⬛⬛🟨🟨 -> lemon ⬛⬛⬛🟨⬛ -> pilot 🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛ -> kutis ⬛🟩⬛⬛⬛ -> pilot ⬛🟨🟨⬛🟨 -> patly ⬛⬛🟩⬛⬛ -> slipt ⬛⬛🟨⬛🟩 -> lambs ⬛⬛🟨🟨⬛ -> toils ⬛⬛🟨⬛🟨 -> tepal ⬛⬛🟩⬛🟩 -> glost ⬛🟨⬛⬛🟩 -> south
:O btw really nice video! The animations were amazing and they made it very fun to watch! Keep it up!
I find it very interesting that in all three of these words, 'A' finds itself in the third position. Is that just a thing where most 5 letter words containing an 'A' have it in the third position or is that meant as a guess to provide most information - or bits?
will we see a follow-up with hard mode consideration?
couple more questions on this super interesting video: 1. i note that the information you are gaining each time seems more based on letter frequency while not really considering letter placement frequency (as your suggested guesses often include words with letters in incorrect places, albeit with 0 probability of being right). that may be another avenue for info gain - ie, doing some analysis on how often a given letter occurs in a specific location. 2. strongly defining what is optimal as it may mean different things to different ppl. you seem to have defined it as lowering the expected number of guesses until being correct. however, another might reasonably define optimal as never missing a puzzle which i suspect would change the strategy being used. and of course my previous question of looking at the puzzle in hard mode would also affect how the previous two points are considered. cheers and thanks for the informative video!
Huh, I ran a much more naive calculation of the best first guess (matching every word in the worlde dictonary against every other word, calculating yellow and green clues, and generating a weighted average score with green clues being a bit more valuable than yellow) and I also came up with SOARE as the best first guess.
I never touched it when Wordle was a big deal, but watching you talk about the maths is making me want to try it for the first time. Congrats on that.
the letters „first naive ideas“ tending to the word „start“ is such a nice detail! well done video!
Some thoughts on CRANE as first guess... I usually guess stare first (an anagram of tares, which your first algorithm likes) but started guessing crate, with the reasoning that a C often comes with an H or K, so finding a C feels like it gives more information even though it's a less likely letter. Essentially, letters that are weighted towards appearing in certain types of words or in certain letter combinations should be more valuable guesses than their simple frequency should predict. C is probably at a sweet spot where it's not too uncommon a letter, and enjoys a big boost from giving you a lot of bonus information if you do find one. Further to this, if you have, say, two certain letters that often appear in combination, it makes sense strategically to include one of these letters and not both in an early guess, as the odds of these letters appearing in the word are far from being independent odds, so guessing one gives you information on the probability of the other - bonus information from just one guessed letter. Hence, since CH and CK are very common associations of letters in common English words, guessing a C but not an H or a K in your first word seems to make a lot of sense from an information standpoint, and I'm not surprised that an algorithm found that guessing a word containing a C first was smart, despite C being quite a way down the letter frequency list.
on that note, i feel like the _position_ of the letter within the 5 could also be valuable. i believe that's why 'tares' is valued over 'stare' because presumably there are more words ending with s, which might be pretty informative.
@@alveolate yeah, letter positioning must be valuable. I actually initially preferred stare over rates (same logic applies to tares) because I thought the wordle would never be a plural so an S in the last position would be bad! Maybe vowels in positions 2 and 4 are better than in positions 3 and 5?
This ^^^. You can easily see it, if you guess a word with "U" and "U" is not in the word, then "Q" isn't either. In code breaking, you'd see a word that ended in "Y" and guess one that ends in "LY" (hard mode) because that's a likely 2 letter combination. I don't have the table of common 2 letter combinations but it's available.
Yeah if we’re playing to eliminate two letter combinations word final s also informs us in situations of “es” (as in tares. just as word initial c would inform us of possible ch words
Try to work out your friends' first words from their scoring patterns - Metawordle :) The worst starter word? "Eerie" - unless it's correct!. Anyone got a worse one?
I do this
If you know someone starts with the same every time, then you can use their scoring pattern to unlock information yourself. Bit cheaty though
@@seastilton7912 I do it to pass the time between puzzles but you make an excellent point.
I do this. It's pretty fun
"queue" must be pretty bad.
i am so thankful for the quality of your educational content. It is amazing to learn so much from just one person.
Thanks for the great video! I think a great addition to this algorithm would be the removal of already used words in previous wordles. This would decrease the overall entropy a little since some pretty common words were already used. Anyways, great video, I always learn so much from you!!
Would love to see how you would approach tackling Wordle’s “Hard Mode.” Loved it, thanks so much for making this
I’d love to see the changes hard mode creates as well.
Ditto! What’s the best first word in Hard Mode? Great video! (but none of it applies to my game lol)
@@kidalan lol😐
@@kidalan I go for the naïve frequency analysis-based route. 'orate' is my go-to atm, but it used to be 'opera'. That is not to say by any means it is optimal.
@@__a_4444 I like those openers! I usually open with adieu or ourie. I like to establish which vowels I’m working with, then use that foundation to shoot down consonants. If there was a word with five vowels, I’d use that every time. 😆
My friend and I like AUDIO/STERN as a double opening. It covers all traditional vowels without repeat letters and tests S in the first slot which is the most common starting letter for 5 letter words.
I use IRATE/SOUND myself
Nice. ADIEU/SHORT is mine. So instead of the N I’m guessing the H. Other than that it’s the same letters.
@@nigelong1779 I was irate and pound but will definitely switch to sound now
I use AUDIO/LYRES, I did a very non-scientific survey of digraphs and found that S (as first letter), L or R (as second letter) have the most distinct ones, so far I'm averaging 4 so I'm maybe doing as well as a simple robot.
I did exactly these 2 as well, have not had a single misser and played since start. We stopped using it as it became too easy to play with these 2
I randomly got recommended this again today so I decided to do wordle and it was in fact crane
THE DAY IS FINALLY HERE! TODAY’S THE DAY
I played Wordle for the first time just a few minutes ago and used "Other" as my opener and got a 1/6 thanks man
The same thing literally happend to me RIGHT NOW, I was shocked lmao!!
ahaha me too
I got 4/6
oh
@@NovaaZR he meant tht day the actual word was *OTHER* so he got it right on the first try lol
This whole video is great but I have to say I liked the cute word play around 19:00 quite a lot.
I really like this approach. Since you can calculate all these state on every possible guess vs every possible solution. Which is an O(n^2) algorithm and can be efficiently computed. I didn't think of that at first for some reason I thought it might not be possible to computer this kind of information.
6/21/2023, i opened youtube, saw this on my homepage, opened wordle, typed in crane and got it correct first try
I would like to see a Hard Mode version of this analysis and how the algorithm reacts to it.
Yeah I was like damn not even playing hard mode. Gotta step up
@@oldcouchcushion1545 Not playing hard mode = weaksauce
I JUST started a college class on information theory. I'll have to watch this again a couple of times but its so helpful to have a real world example!
real worlde example :D
@@EscurKo haha yes yes, you get it. Its not a book exercise.
Ever since seeing this video over 1 year ago, I have been EXCLUSIVELY using CRANE as my opener. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. And finally….. Today was the day, 6/21/2023 The Wordle was CRANE, I have never been so happy to guess the Wordle, and of course I started off with CRANE, and boom! FIRST TRY, IT WAS FINALLY CRANES DAY TO SHINE!!
Can confirm “crane” is the best opener.
Grant that little bit you did with "these is in the eighth position" etc was absolutely brilliant. Great video as ever, thank you.
Making a word game about math. I LOVE IT
hi evan
Hi Evan
@Ex Japan you're lucky,
I lost $1500 trading with an unprofessional trader.
There are lots of good experts out there but most offer little ROI's. I will advise trading with Mr Nicholas Burke-Gaffney's team as I make over $35,000 on average per month from their trading bots.
This is great. I was using AISLE, and sometimes use COUNT as my second since both words cover all the vowels and both have different consonants that I thought were somewhat common. Turns out my intuition was correct since they're all near the top of that popularity list!
i like anime and shout
you can always do: GLENT BRICK JUMPY VOZHD WAQFS this eliminates 25/26 letters and just leaves X
After incorporating Relative Word Frequencies of all words, a next step may be to rank relative letter frequency for each letter position, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 (noting that letter-frequencies for five-letter words is different than for all words: "soare" rates higher than "arose"). The letter distributions also change for each step for the 'remaining' possible words.
20:10 It is interesting and I think people should keep in mind how even in highly mathematic scenarios, human preference is still involved not always, but not never
Yeah, and the more nuanced version of this is that human preference is used where a heuristic is more cost-efficient than more computing. In this case, Grant used his intuition to feel where the cut-off point is. However by the definitions given in this video, this cut-off point should certainly be able to be found in the game-theoretic sense. A quick naive approach would be to try different iterations of the bot using different cut-off points and over millions of iterations find the optimal point. But you see that's exactly why Grant used his intuition as a heuristic instead, because the expected gains from running said millions of iterations is very little compared to what his best guess would do. And as an alternative, if Grant used another method (not brute force simulations) to try to get the exact game-theoretic optimal point, it would be a lot of thinking time used for not much effect.
In WordHoot, a variant of Wordle, where speed matters, I see people consistently beat bots.
In this case he's using a heuristic to approximate the true word distribution which is zero for words not in the wordle list and 1/N for words that are in the wordle list (where N is the size of the wordle list). It's kluge in the sense that he could just use the wordle list for this purpose, but he decided that's off-limits side-information, so he goes ahead and finds a different source of side-information that he can use to approximate the wordle list distribution. The real lesson is that if you require human preference, the problem is likely ill-posed :)
The use of priors (prior beliefs) for making predictions is quite often used in some areas of statistics and machine learning. :)
@@lekhakaananta5864 it's basically a password cracker bot but a bit more chill
Such clarity in explaining things, is why I love this channel. Plus, you do a ton of work to make it visually interesting!
the Gospel: the Gospel isn't solely "Jesus loves you and He can do this, this, and that for you." no, the true Biblical Gospel is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of a holy and just God, and because of this we all deserve death and eternal damnation in hell. our sins have separated us from God and when we were separated from God, we were sold as slaves to sin, under the captivity and care of the devil, whom we love(d). in our sinful nature, we're nothing more than wretched, vile sinners in DIRE need of the Savior, but JESUS, the perfect and sinless Lamb of God, came into the world and took the punishment we deserved for our wicked sins and was raised from the dead three days after being buried so that we may have the opportunity of salvation, redemption, adoption, and reconciliation to the Heavenly Father. we ought to repent and believe in the Gospel of our LORD Jesus Christ; we must be born-again. (Mark 8:36,37) (John 3:16), (Acts 17:30), (Romans 6:23), (John 3:5), (Ecclesiastes 12:13), (Mark 1:15).
amazing video as always! please don't ever stop producing them !!
This video taught me more about information theory in 30min than two university courses on AI did in half a year. I wish I had seen it back when i was learning about that
Wordle has existed in Dutch as "Lingo" for probably 30 or so years as a public tevelision show, with variable word length too. Near one of its last shows there were two brothers who developed an algorithm to guess these words during the show which they could play out in their head and they won literally every round and after they won they put their full way of thinking on internet.
Could you give a link to that please? Klinkt heel erg interessant!
Also been around as a tv show called "MOTUS" in France
You might be interested to know Lingo actually started in the US in 1987 and has had international versions in at least 15 countries. Those two brother remind me of Michael Larson who memorized the pattern of the Press Your Luck board and used it to beat the system.
Also very similar to the game “Mastermind” that uses colored pegs instead of letters.
Link?
I learned about entropy from a graphic novel called Meanwhile. It's a choose your own adventure revolving around a scientist and three inventions, the kill everyone button, a time machine, and a memory transfer machine, highly reccomend, more of a puzzle than a book. Great video as always! Edit: Author's Name is Jason Shiga.
I loved that book as a kid
goated book
@@kylemcleod4115 same
I will be checking that out
favorite book ever
Just wanted to thank you for this video I got wordle in 1 yesterday. Guess it’s time to change my word to Salet. ;)
Good to see you all here 😀
Here's an interesting alternate goal: what if rather than optimizing for fewest guesses, you built a bot that attempted to maximize the amount of times it could guess the answer in 2 guesses, and only after failing to do so would try to minimize its remaining score. Basically a risk-taking bot that's more in it for the bragging rights of the unlikely got-it-in-two situation more than it cares about reliably doing well.
why even bother going beyond 2 guesses? didnt get it in 2, you failed.
wouldnt that exponentially increase the complexity of the computation. Is it even solvable within 2 steps ? I think grant mentions something along the same lines.
@@adityapalve3752 I don't know why you think the computation would be far more complex since you're only looking 1/2 guesses into the future. It isn't solvable within 2 steps, but you can try to solve it within 2 steps as much as possible (likely by increasing the weighting of the frequencies of the words; this gives you less information in the long term but increases the chance that you get lucky on the second guess). Hopefully this makes sense lol.
Especially with the long tails it is definitely possible to trade 'get it in 3 or less more than x% of the time' for the average score
That just means doing the first two guesses in hard mode and the continuing normally. Which in reality just means the set of guessable words on the second guess is smaller.
It's not exclusive to this particular video of his, but there is something strangely refreshing about learning about things I don't understand. Like the prime numbers video of the monster, it's so refreshing to hear someone talk so plainly and expositorily yet still pass way over my head. I love learning how little I actually know, and this channel (among others) refreshes my brain so well. Please accept my sleepy and sincere appreciation. TL:DR ~ I like your funny words magic man
don't get too excited - it's just conceptual baloney.
@@JamesHawkeKZhead Conceptual? He tested it; it's quite evidential.
Thank you, just got it on first try tonight lol
I use the Wheel of Fortune method to start. My first two guesses are LEARN and MOIST because they include R,S,T,L,N and E just like Wheel plus they give me the vowels A,I, and O and the common consonant M.
Wordle literally saved a woman's life when the daughter realized the mother hadn't sent her a wordle for the day. Turns out the mother had someone break in to her house and was being held hostage. She was saved by police after the daughters tip.
I heard about that
Really happy it worked out well for the family, but I also laughed my ass off when I read it. "Mom didn't send me her Wordle, I gotta call the cops RIGHT NOW"
"911, what's your emergency?" - "My mother hasn't sent in her wordle today" "Don't worry ma'm, we'll handle it. *noises* Squad 12, get the tank, we got an anti-wordler!" *background* "God, another one, hope it doesn't end in an airstrike this time!"
@@sorsocksfake they actually had to get their armored personal carrier out because of the hostage
SAVED was word of the day!
this was a fun problem to solve :) my friend and I essentially constructed a solver with the same methods but we conceptualized it in a very different way. really cool video!
hi geo
Thank you for your service geo
hey it’s the big cactus guy
you mean you did and matt was watching chess lmao
hi minecraft man
best opener: especially today!
Really great video. Helped clarify and solidify some of my thoughts regarding information theory. Wordle was also a nice familiar subject choice.
9:28 I think this is the perfect explanation to the whole concept of Akinator. Yes, it also cheats by just using a user-created database but getting to the answer in less number of questions is the real challenge.
"fewer"
I don’t know why, but this was the most calming video I’ve ever watched… math can be so relaxing sometimes
His voice is extremely soothing. I'm going to check out his other videos just because of that 😂 Edit: I discovered this is a math channel. While I enjoyed this video, I'll have to reconsider because math and I have not historically had a great relationship
What a momentous day
I love opening with “House” It’s like a go-to, offs 3 vowels, and the most used consonant :)
As a chemist, i've been using "tares" (3rd person singular - saves the mass of an empty/full in a scale to determine the difference after doing something with it) for over a month, so i feel accomplished seeing this haha:)
TARES are also a corn/seed used in fishing (in the UK)
I’m a cashier at a grocery store and I’ve been using “tares” too.
Im a random kid and I have been using stare which is kinda the same but tares might be better
I also work in a grocery store, but I use the word “rates”
soare is a good starting word too
This is PERFECT for me! Over the past week I have been fiddling with my own Python wordle "bot". I first made a small text mode version of the game to I could play more, and have slowly worked on my solver. It find skip letters and remove candidates with those letters. It can collect correct letter(bad position) and perfect letters. Yesterday I started going into putting some "weight" to the candidates left, nut I have some funky issues. So this video is a PERFECT next step for me to study. :)
I am being humble when I am telling you that I am the most powerful strongest coolest smartest most famous greatest funniest Y*uTub3r of all time! That's the reason I have multiple girlfriends and I show them off all the time! Bye bye pa
this is so cool i want to try making a wordle bot in python too !!
@@lolajuliet2662 I made one this morning because I was bored. I figured out one relatively easy way is using regular expressions to check the possibilities and spit out a list that could fit the information at hand. Then I just pick one. Also working on weighting the results.
I really thought that I was the only guy on the planet willing to go through so much analysis, math, and tool development just to win a video game. Thanks for making me feel slightly less weird.
Every one of your videos can be published to a conference or journal. Great job as usual.
That wordplay in the sorted list of most common words broke my brain more than any math you've ever presented on this channel. Great work, lovely video!
timestamp please
@@joseville 18:40
I think this also shows how amazing the human mind is, because even without knowing all this, we can sort of figure out that four is normal, three takes skill, and two is just lucky.
I always start with rouse or louse cause having o, u, s, and e is pretty useful
today, 6/21/23, crane is an especially good guess
Cool video! Loved the math! It would be different for hard mode though where you can't ignore the clues you already have.
Was thinking the same thing! I liked the little teaser at the end, but wish the video went into it more as “hard mode” is my preferred way to play
I’ve never played this but if that’s the restrictions of hard mode, it seems more like dumb mode.. which I suppose you could also refer to as hard mode
@@Jay22222 true
@@Jay22222 What do you mean? If your first guess gave you the information that an R and an E are in the word, then your 2nd guess has to have an R and an E in it. That gives you 2 less spots to try new letters. It's significantly harder.
@@Jay22222 why tho lol
I have studied information theory in top level engineering school and I had never seen this explained as clear as this, not even close. This video makes me wonder about the future of education.
The word play with the top 13 5 letter words was awesome!
I watched this video for the first time exactly a year ago, came back to watch your youtube explanation on the measure of entropy for my information theory class. The official lecture papers on that topic are so obscure