WordleBot

I somehow missed this until a few weeks ago, but the New York Times has a Wordle analysis tool called WordleBot. It’s not a cheating tool, but rather a tool you load (in the same browser in which you play Wordle, so it can read the game cookies) after you complete Wordle each day. (You can also submit a screenshot of a completed game.)

Because you use WordleBot after you play, it doesn’t spoil much. It just analyzes how smart and how lucky your guesses were. I have a dumb command-line tool I wrote myself months ago that does something similar, but my simple tool just lists possible solutions given what’s known (green, yellow, gray) about the puzzle so far. (My tool could be used to cheat, but I have no idea why anyone would want to.)

I say that WordleBot doesn’t spoil much because it does spoil one thing: its possible solution list is culled from the game itself. My tool uses a dictionary of all possible five-letter words from the TWL06 tournament Scrabble dictionary, with additions from a few other word list sources. It doesn’t seem right to me to assume knowledge of the 2,309 words currently in the Wordle solution list. (My list has 8,954 words.) At the very least WordleBot should use the list of allowable guesses from Wordle, not the list of actual solutions. That’s a niggle though.

★ Thursday, 26 May 2022