Bert Hubert

I liked this deconstruction of Wordle a lot: https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle/

Someone recently tried to work out what starting word would give you the best head start with this game: https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle/

The exactly-five-letter word guesser that includes virtual keyboard that paints keys as hints as the game progresses? After explicitly mentioning in a comment that the game was derived from Wordle - "I came across https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle... on HN the other day". The OP now added "About", with weasel-worded reference to Wordle. Jesus. How hard is it to just acknowledge other people's work that you are directly borrowing from.

I came across https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle/ on HN the other day, and decided to do my own take on the concept as a little weekend project.

There have been a few attempts to answer this. One approach is to look at which guess, averaging across all answer words, gets the most hits. You'd expect a word that uses several of the most common letters ETAOIN etc. This helps you quickly discover letters that appear in the answer. Using this strategy, a common first guess is SOARE, explained here: https://bert.org/2021/11/24/the-best-starting-word-in-wordle/ Missed letters provide information as well, though. Instead of optimizing for the most green/yellow hits, you could divide the entire solution space by the 3^5 possible green/yellow/gray patterns generated by the initial guess. Which initial guess divides most evenly, so you can reliably eliminate 99% of the possible answers? That would be ROATE, explained here: https://medium.com/@tglaiel/the-mathematically-optimal-first-guess-in-… Note that ROATE and SOARE are very similar to one another. There are 729 T's in the Wordle wordlist and 669 S's, so ROATE seems like the slightly better answer. (If going by the first strategy, why SOARE and not ROATE if there are more T's? Probably because there are 3x as many words that start with S than R in the list, so it optimizes towards locking in the first letter.)

It's not from the VFX team but someone wrote a clone of the ATM hacking program https://bert.org/2021/01/04/t2-pin-cracking/

Somebody actually integrated ChatGPT with Dr.Sbaitso: https://bert.org/2023/01/06/chatgpt-in-dr-sbaitso/

I've written this comment before bu what you need is a remotely controlled finger for pressing YubiKeys: https://bert.org/2020/10/01/pressing-yubikeys/