PSALM → Whiff. But, two comcons gone, lets try three more along with E & O
TONER → Still kinda out of it. I kinda like the E at the end, and I feel like I should try an I before doubling up on the E, and then I just played around with other letters until I saw (and tried) DIRGE → Which was exceptionally lucky. RIDGE
There were at least 20 good possibiities out there, and somehow I got the one that pointed to the solution exactly. We’ve got a good DIRGE/RIDGE club going, my excuse was my starting word put me into the right mindset for that penultimate guess.
First thing I saw was prude but that didn’t feel like a wordle word. Then pride and prime, thinking I was going to be rolling a 50-50 shot but turns out both have already been answers. Couple more seconds of looking and price became obvious.
EDIT: Just realized that I never saw a prize, but that’s also already been an answer.
Wordlebot changed its starting word from SLATE to TRACE a little while ago so I switched to TRACE also because my goal is to out-Wordle the bot. It was a disaster. With SLATE I consistently got a three 5 or 6 times a week. With TRACE I was getting mostly fours and fives. I have gone back to SLATE and I’m back to getting threes. In fact, the last seven days were terrific - 6 threes and a two.
I’m not sure why I did so poorly when starting with TRACE. But now Wordlebot has changed its starting word to CRANE. I’m sticking with SLATE. The Wordlebot developers admit that the difference in success for Wordlebot between these words is minimal - something like a 0.005% difference, which apparently means solving one Wordle in one less guess than it would have over the course of a few years.
RIDGE → Hey, good start. But what next? I can’t see a word with two comcons, so I’ll go with one
SPIRE → Missed on the S, but got the P. I can try another comcon here, so I’ll give it a go
TRIPE → Ouch. OK, PRIDE is out. PRIME? Or PRICE
PRIZE completely avoided my attention. So 6 was possible. I feel like I could have done better on this one after that start.
When I see what people have to say about Wordlebot, I often wonder if it isn’t just messing with people’s heads. But a bot’s wired very differently from a human being. Each of us humans has different ways of perceiving the same situation, different things we’ll pick up on and different things that we’ll totally miss.
This is as true in Wordle as it is in life in general. And different starting words are going to work better, or not so well, with our different approaches to the game, and what we see and don’t see given the incomplete evidence of some green and yellow letters. So those three starting words may be almost equally effective for the bot, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be equally effective for you or me.
