My Wordle failure

 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!

Laptop irritations

 This isn't really maths (except in so far as all computing is maths) but I am going to vent a couple of frustrations regarding laptops.  

First, I am sure there is a good reason for this design feature and I would be delighted if someone could enlighten me.  Here is part of the keyboard of this laptop:

Now, note the position of the on/off switch (lit up in the photo). It's in the middle of the top row of keys. Why?  In other laptops I have used, the on/off switch is easy to find because it is placed apart from the other keys.  With this keyboard, it's hard to find (with my eyesight the marking isn't very clear to me, especially in low light, and of course it isn't lit up when I want to switch the laptop on).  Worse, it is next to the delete key, and on more than one occasion I have hit the off key instead of delete.  (You have to hold it down for a time to switch the machine off, and so far I have only accidentally switched it off once when in the middle of a piece of work, but the possibility is now always in the back of my mind.)

It seems to me utterly illogical to place the on/off switch where it is.  But it is so illogical that there must have been a deliberate design decision to do so and there must be a good reason for it.  Can anyone tell me?

My second point is just venting at an irritation.  I don't like my laptops making noises when I am working, so the first thing I do is switch off all notifications.  But still some persist.  (Why, when I save a Word document as a PDF and the file already exists, does it have to beep as well as displaying an "are you sure" box?  I find myself swearing aloud at the machine when it does this, and I have spent more time than it is worth trying to find out how to switch it off.)

What is worse than that is that the machine makes random beeps at odd times.  (These do not correlate to emails arriving or anything like that, as far as I can tell.)  It even does it when I have locked the computer.  Presumably these are important warnings, but I can't find out what they are.  Nothing has popped up in another window and there is no indication that I can see as to the reason for the beep.  What event is so important that the laptop has to interrupt me to tell me it has occurred, but isn't sufficiently important for me to be told what has happened?