Solving Wordle using information theory
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as the go-to explanation of optimal Wordle openers like CRANE and a friendly introduction to information theory, also relevant to Mastermind.
What it is
3Blue1Brown uses Wordle as an excuse to teach information theory and entropy, building a solver that picks guesses by expected information and incorporating word frequencies.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends dowakin · 2022-02 · on “Play Wordle from Your Terminal”
If you wonder why in the demo author uses `crane` as first guess - check out recent video from 3Blue1Brown [this video]
Recommends bnycum · 2023-08 · on “Mastermind Solver”
Reminds me of the 3Blue1Brown video about Wordle, and then it's followup video. I guess that's kind of a spoiler, but still worth a watch. [this video] [LINK]
Cites sargstuff · 2022-04 · on “Λ-2D: Exploration of Drawing as Programming Language, Ideas from Lambda Calculus”
Warning: Bit of a 'Hitch hikers guide to the galaxy"/conway game of life yak shave for a reply. Nice start to providing a simple way to visually interact/experiment/manipulate different multiple Neural network concepts by loading/transforming any traditional code (working or not) & reshuffling/tesselating the structual representation of the code to generate a turing tape path via color execution paths. Switching to pi calculus could provide the theory to support coroutine/coprossing/ threading" multiple interacting tape paths/color combinations/path diffs/scaled recusion to perform assembly language instructions. Raster graphics without the yak ( [LINK] ) Feed back between tape & "traditiona
Cites pstuart · 2023-12 · on “Seven Things We Learned Analyzing 515M Wordles”
Interesting that SLATE is the apparent optimum opener. I found a youtube that "showed" that CRANE is mathematically optimal: [this video] The second guess (if a low hit count) fleshes out the remaining vowels. My average is 4, followed by 3.
Cites bschne · 2024-01 · on “How to solve the "Mastermind" guessing game? (2009)”
ICYMI, 3blue1brown (Grant Sanderson) has a video applying information theory to solving Wordle, which is conceptually similar to mastermind -- [this video]