from Hacker News

Guess the daily Wordle in one try using the tweet distribution

by benhamner on 1/27/22, 3:11 PM with 113 comments

by jeffchien on 1/27/22, 10:20 PM
Waiting for a bot that guesses based on Google Trends:
* Wordle 218: https://i.imgur.com/PbYfLm6.jpg * Wordle 221: https://i.imgur.com/pTPbquL.jpg
by srcreigh on 1/27/22, 4:18 PM
My favourite part of this is accounting for some fake grids.
Kudos! I have been so curious lately as to whether this was possible.
EDIT: The next question is which (if any) of these signals can be removed and still get it in 1 guess. Or if there are any other signals. Or how many tweets are needed (is 50 enough? 10? or 1000? 10k?)
by del_operator on 1/27/22, 6:24 PM
Two or three guesses with Wordle using the ETAOIN SHRDLU I learned doing cryptopals has been very effective at reaching a solution.
I usually have a first guess like SAINT then something like SCARE, CORED, etc eliminating vowels and frequent constants while also considering the most likely sequencing of matched characters or remaining characters.
Also eliminating S, T, C really reveals there’s no TH, SH, SP, CK, etc and is one factor that gets me suspicious of repeated chars or rarer k, g and x combos.
by rogerallen on 1/27/22, 4:22 PM
SPOILER ALERT: shows today's answer!
by nilay on 1/27/22, 11:54 PM
Or take all the fun away and just get it through browser console ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
```
  JSON.parse(localStorage.gameState).solution
```
by beepbooptheory on 1/27/22, 4:35 PM
This is brilliant and something I had the intuition was possible, just couldn't put it all together myself. What was missing, I think, in my thought process was just taking into account the general common occurrence of words in English in general. Plus how to deal with static.
Just so cool someone put this together, major props.
by Karunamon on 1/27/22, 4:24 PM
Very cool!
One minor improvement here; if the user has toggled colorblind mode on, then their tweeted result will also have altered color blocks. Orange for right letter right place, and blue for right letter wrong place.
by csours on 1/27/22, 4:08 PM
My metagame is guessing my friend's guesses.
by Boom_Rang on 1/28/22, 1:34 PM
I like that it's robust to adversarial tweets!
I did something similar last week using the Twitter Stream API: https://github.com/basile-henry/twitter-wordle
It's not resistant to adversarial tweets, but it usually collects enough tweets to have an answer in around 1 minute, so it's not too bad to restart if some bad tweets were sampled.
Maybe I should try to use your wordle-tweets dataset to make it work offline as well. :)
by rkimb on 1/27/22, 5:00 PM
This is a really cool approach, definitely did not think of trying this! If you'd prefer to play without the crowdsourced data, I spent a couple hours on the following dictionary search algo yesterday which can typically solve puzzles in 3-4 guesses: https://github.com/rgkimball/wordlebot
by freeslave on 1/27/22, 4:05 PM
Cool but don't read all the way if you haven't done today's Wordle!
by siruva07 on 1/27/22, 5:01 PM
This is the HN I’m here for. Brilliant.
by swatts999 on 1/27/22, 4:34 PM
This is super smart. I wonder how many tweets this approach needs each day to converge to the correct answer? It would be interesting to see some plots vs. num tweets
by jonny_eh on 1/27/22, 5:43 PM
This is your regular reminder that today's word, and all the upcoming ones, are located in the Wordle minified JS.
by codeflo on 1/27/22, 4:54 PM
I wonder what percentage of these Twitter posts are fake (“OMG so lucky LOL”).
by jsmith99 on 1/27/22, 5:03 PM
If you know someone always starts with SLATE it makes it easier...
by alana314 on 1/28/22, 1:16 AM
I use (not today's puzzle) cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v 'w' | grep -v 'a' | grep 't' | egrep '^...er$'
by Asraelite on 1/27/22, 5:05 PM
What are the "⬛ squares taking social media by storm"?
by hkmaxpro on 1/27/22, 6:05 PM
> Note that all of these 243 possibilities aren't valid in practice. For example YYYYM will never be seen because if the first four letters are correctly placed and the fifth is also in the word, it will be correctly placed.
Not true. For example if the correct answer is TWEED and you guess TWEET, then you’ll get YYYYM.
Edit: As pointed out by two commenters, the actual implementation contradicts the following claim in the post:
> “Maybe” - the letter is in the answer but in a different position
If the correct answer is TWEED and you gess TWEET, you will still get YYYYN, because the actual implementation uses a different definition of “Maybe” than what is written in the post.
by olliej on 1/28/22, 2:54 AM
Something I’ve wondered about is how well you can guess what peoples guesses were from the images they post.
by smaudet on 1/27/22, 8:49 PM
I mean, I guess - or you can just use a private tab. Same difference, except way less complex.
by mtoner23 on 1/27/22, 4:03 PM
Amazing, what a brilliant idea
by cafed00d on 1/28/22, 5:36 AM
Computer nerds strike wordle! Goddammit! How long before Skynet. Sigh. The end is nigh
/s
by madcow2011 on 1/27/22, 5:51 PM
This is genius. I love it.
by jl6 on 1/27/22, 7:15 PM
Lessons to be learned in the field of data anonymization!
by mrfusion on 1/28/22, 2:06 PM
Would this be a good use of a hidden Markov model?
by bushbaba on 1/27/22, 6:28 PM
Guess the daily wordle by inspecting source code…yes every word is hard coded in the JavaScript in calendar order
by quotha on 1/28/22, 1:18 AM
And people think bitcoin wastes energy.
by faeyanpiraat on 1/27/22, 5:34 PM
What is Wordle?
by jcpham2 on 1/27/22, 6:19 PM
Can someone TL:dr what this Wordless thing is?
by ouid on 1/27/22, 7:29 PM
Now someone make an adversarial twitter bot.
by Axien on 1/27/22, 6:37 PM
I am trying so hard to not know what Wordle is or how to play. Now it is showing up on Hacker News? Damn. I’ve not had this much trouble since I avoided Sudoku.
by nerdjon on 1/27/22, 6:22 PM
I like the idea of worldle
But I hate that any guesses have to be words in its dictionary.
As someone who was never really a fan of crosswords, the need to find a real word that fits 5 letters every time severely limits how I can enjoy it.
by not2b on 1/27/22, 4:13 PM
You can guess it in one try by carefully reading the code. There is no server that knows the correct answer. The client already knows, based on the date. That is why you can only play once per day.