wordler-cli 0.0.1

Wordle solver!

Wordler!

Wordler! is an app for solving Wordle puzzles. In its current form, Wordler! is a command line interface (CLI) app, but work on a web app is underway, too.

Using Wordler! is pretty straightforward. First, you provide your initial guess to the app, and then it will ask if this initial guess solved the possible. If the puzzle has not been solved, the app will then ask for Wordle's feedback on the guess. Wordler! will display the letter in the guess, and you'll select which letters Wordle has highlighted green and which letters Wordle has highlighted yellow.

Wordler! will then take this information and provide you with a new guess - along with a probability that this guess is the answer to the puzzle - to enter into Wordle. It will then go through the same steps of asking if the puzzle has been solved, and if not asking for the green and yellow tiles. Wordler! solves the puzzle almost all of the time, and on average, takes about 3.65 guess (including your initial guess) to find the correct word.

Check out the example of Wordler! solving the puzzle for the word "meter" below:

Installation

The Wordler! CLI app has been published to PyPI and can be installed with PIP.

pip install wordler-cli

You can also build the CLI app directly from source by running the following in an environment of your choosing:

pip install git+https://github.com/k-bartolomeo/wordler.git

Methodology

Wordler! starts off with sets of all possible letters for each position in a word. As it receives feedback from the Wordle game itself, it will update these sets of letters. For example, if the correct word is meter and the guess word is tried, Wordle will mark the e in tried green and the t and the r yellow. After receiving this information from the user, Wordler! will then update the set of possible letters for each position as follows:

• Remove t from the set of possible letters for the first position.
• Remove r from the set of possible letters for the second position.
• Reduce the set for the fourth position to just the letter e, since that is the correct letter.
• Remove the letters i and d from all position sets since they are not in the goal word.
• Update the set of letters that must be included in the next guess to include t, r, and e if they are not present in the set already.

From there, Wordler! will update the list of remaining possible words based on the letters available for each position. Then, it will compute a probability for each remaining word using a combination of letter probabilities given word positions, transition probabilities from one letter to the next, and usage probabilities. The need for the first two probabilities is pretty self-evident; the inclusion of the usage probabilities, on the other hand, is based on the assumption that the NY Times editor choosing the Wordle words will be more likely to choose words that are used more often, as opposed to words with which the general public may be less familiar.

As far as the calculation of these various probabilities goes, the letter probabilities given the word positions are computed using counts of each letter in each position in the words in the Wordle corpus. Similar counts from the words in the Wordle corpus are used for the transition probabilities. These transition counts also consider word position in order to account for the fact that the probability of a transition, for example, from letter 1 to letter 2 might be higher if letter 1 is the first letter in the word instead of the third letter in the word. Usage probabilities are taken from this subset of usage counts derived from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus.

Web App

A web application that offers the same functionality as the CLI, albeit in a more aesthetically pleasing manner, is currently under development. This application is being built using mostly Python and the Dash framework, with a small bit of JavaScript sprinkled in. The basic layout of the application is pictured below, and the code that has been written for the app thus far can be found on the app-dev branch of this repository.