In the Upshot’s recent analysis of 515 million Wordle games played over a year, we noted that a few changes would soon be coming to WordleBot’s dictionary. As of Wednesday, those changes are now
Your Wordle starter word can make a big difference to your game. Photo / Getty Images
How small? On average, the bot expects to solve a Wordle in 0.0006 fewer guesses on average when it starts with TRACE rather than SLATE. If you play Wordle every day, it would take you more than 4 1/2 years to save one guess by opening with TRACE instead of SLATE. By comparison, ADIEU — the most common starting word among Wordle players — trails TRACE by about one-fifth of a guess, adding up to 74 extra turns for the bot over the course of a year.
In addition to reader guesses, we rely on data sources like usage frequency in the Times. All else being equal, the more common a word is (as measured by how frequently it’s appeared in the Times since 2000), the more likely it will be included in the bot’s dictionary.
This dictionary, in which each word is assigned a probability of being a solution, affects the skill scores assigned by the bot. (With two plausible words remaining, for example, we don’t want to penalise players with a zero skill score if they choose MERCH over MARCH.) The bot is making educated guesses at which words could be solutions just the way humans do, and it continues to learn as each daily Wordle solution is published, so there’s no guarantee that TRACE will be best for the Wordle solutions to come. But in our more expansive dictionary, it’s now the bot’s best bet.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Josh Katz and Toni Monkovic
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