Wordle is Fun (for programmers and data scientists)
So, yes obviously wordle is a fun game to play, but I refer actually to the multitude of interesting programming and analytical efforts that have come out of the game. Many of these were written up at News Stack back in January, but I thought I’d sum up other (and my own) efforts here a little bit, starting with the efforts I think are least common.
Solvers / bots
I found this very cool bot leaderboard via this this excellent writeup on the state of wordle solving. Best average guess is 3.4212 with SALET as the first guess. Precomputing algorithms based on this and you can watch it in action yourself (or use it) here.
My bot is not state of the art, and intentionally somewhat hobbled by using its own home-rolled dictionary, rather than the official wordle answer list from the source code. It was fun to write, but it only does a one-step lookhead to find a guess that on average reduces the remaining words the least.
The original video from 3Blue1Brown talks about this in the context of information theory.