Earlier this week, on 24 February, my Wordle streak of over 200 successes came to a sad end. (For those who don't know the game, each day one has to deduce a five-letter word in at most six guesses, learning after each attempt whether each letter is correct and in the correct place, or correct but out of position.) I play the hard version, which requires that each guess be consistent with the results of all previous attempts.
After two guesses I knew the word had the form _I_ER. At this point I was in trouble - the hard version meant that every subsequent guess had to have this form, so I could try only two new letters each time and there were too many possibilities to guarantee success in the six permitted rounds. And I failed to find the right one.
So I was interested to see this puzzle tackled by Mark Goodliffe of Cracking the Cryptic. He faced the same problem I did. Spoiler warning - next sentence is in white text so you don't have to read it. Mark succeeded - with a little good fortune, which I feel he thoroughly deserved because he was aware of the possibility of repeated letters, which I had overlooked. But (without indulging in schadenfreude) I was relieved to see from the comments that I was not the only person whose streak had ended with that puzzle - perhaps I shouldn't blame myself too much!
So how could I have done better? It seems to me that as soon as I knew that the solution contained E and R I was in difficulty. My strategy is to choose an opening guess that is made up of common letters. But perhaps if I want to be sure of success in six guesses I can't afford to have both E and R in my initial guess?
Of course, success in six attempts isn't the only possible objective. I am tyring to get my average number of attempts as far below 4 as I can, and so I may have to accept the occasional failure in order to achieve that goal - a strategy that guarantees success in six goes every time might have a higher average number of guesses.
I know there are people who have done much more analysis than I have who know exactly how to optimise their choices but my comments are based on intuition rather than hard evidence!
