This is a small helper program for Wordle players to generate guess suggestions. It was written largely to refamiliarize myself with Go.
From the project root execute go run . to launch the helper. It will prompt you up to six times for your guess and your results from Wordle.
Guess: crane
Results: xxyyg
Suggested guesses: [ranee manse dance mange rance range lance hanse hance zonae]
Guesses must be five-characters long and consist only of letters.
Results must be five-characters long and consist only of x (gray tile) y (yellow tile) or g (green tile) corresponding to the output from your guess in Wordle.
After each input set of guess and result it will output the 10 best guesses, based on the strategy described below, or less if there are not 10 words remaining to suggest.
The word-suggestion strategy used in the helper is very naive. The following rules are checked for all words in the list, and if any rules are broken the word is discarded from possible guesses:
- If the word contains a letter marked x in the result, discard the word
- If the word has a letter marked y in the result in the same position, discard the word
- If the word does not contain a letter marked y in the result in some position, discard the word
- If the word does not have a letter marked g in the result in the same position, discard the word
On each iteration this removes invalid words from the list, allowing a new top-10 suggestions to reach the highest scores.
Scoring of potential words is done via a naive letter-frequency summation. Before asking for guesses the helper calculates the letter frequency for all 5-letter Scrabble-legal words in each position. For example, the distribution for 'a' is [534 1607 888 736 423] meaning that 534 words have 'a' as their first letter, 1607 their second letter, and so on.
To determine the "best" word the frequency for each letter in the word for that position is summed. This is not and optimized scoring method, but it generates reasonable results.