Oh, wait, actually the best Wordle opener is not “crane”…

It takes courage to admit a self-made error, and in this case, an extra effort to make a video explaining it. Thank you Grant, this says, directly and indirectly, a lot of good things about you.

I always start with, "ADIEU" since it has four vowels. My second guess is, "STOMP" since it has the fifth vowel along with S,T,M,P, which are letters that are more commonly used.

Admitting a mistake and correcting it is the pinnacle of studying math and/or coding. I love how "noble" this channel is.

just so y'all know: 1) six words have been removed from the official answer set so it's now down to 2,309 words. The words that were removed: AGORA, PUPAL, FIBRE, LYNCH, SLAVE, WENCH 2) no answer word ever repeats. So as time goes on ... that list of 2,309 is shrinking by one every day. Ideally if you wanted to play the optimal first word, you'd rerun your code on a daily basis!

My mom plays Wordle, and she opens with the word “audio” every time to get the vowels. She tries to use the letter “E” in her second word. She’s only ever lost once.

It's interesting that SOARE keeps showing up in your lists, because it's also the top word from a simpler and more arbitrary method by Bertrand Fan ("The Best Starting Word in WORDLE"). They just counted how many green and yellow tiles you get from each starting guess if you use that guess on the whole answer list, but gave greens twice as much weight as yellows.

An excellent follow up video. Came for an answer, but stuck all the way through and gained some insights.

I started playing wordle really late, about 7 months ago, and on my own came up with a group of starting wordles that seemed intuitive to me based on my experiences watching Wheel of Fortune growing up. And my list is SLATE STALE STEAL LEAST TALES I was honestly super proud of myself for coming this close to the best answer just by thinking about how other word games work

Public corrections show a dedication to intellectual integrity. I am so grateful we have creators on YouTube who are dedicated to quality and honesty. Keep it up, Grant!

i mean a lot of it just takes time to analyze, it's good that you were able to identify this

Your esence of linear algebra has helped me so much honestly, please make esence of basic analysis🙏🙏🙏 The linear algebra series has made me from barley getting through exams to acing them with ease, as it so much easier now to study, mor fun, and it makes sense. Before I was just memorizing everything to get through and to pass the exam.

My favourite starting word is 'adieu' as it shows four out of the five vowels immediately. You can tell a lot about a word by the placement of its vowels.

There are two joys in solving a puzzle: The first is finding the solution; the second is exploring the process. Applying information theory to the process is a joy in itself, and for some a joy greater than finding an answer. Similar feats are done that result in Rubik’s cubes being solved by robots, or machines that can sink a basketball from anywhere on the half court. The mechanics of invention are not finding a solution, but in finding a new puzzle in the process that leads to a better solution. Farming is advanced not by figuring out how to make it rain or have longer days to work, but on solving problems of yield and disease. Transportation is advanced not by breading better horses, but making cars, trucks, and airplanes. This is true out-of-the-box thinking, looking at the problem with eyes that are larger or smaller than the problem in its original form requires. There is a joy here that needs no apology, because the exercise is in its own right a challenge to be met and the consequences of such exploration may yield innovations with far greater benefits than knowing the answer to today’s Wordle.

Yeah, as a real human playing the game, I actually aim to find the most consonants, and ideally the first letter of the word, as this helps my brain think of possibilities more readily, instead of having just vowels and maybe a letter somewhere in the middle. So statistically "best" and "best for me to use when trying to solve the puzzle" are likely to be very different.

I always like to look around my location and use the first 5-letter word I find. If it contains common letters then it's possible to get more green and yellow letters. If it contains more uncommon letters like Q and X, if they're right, then it narrows down the guess opportunities.

This was very interesting as an information theory thing. I have come up with Scart, being folky as my "optimal" starting strategy. Thanks and keep up the good work.

I always like to start with "Share", usually followed by "Point" if the first guess produces all greys. Seeing "soare" as such a highly rated first guess is a bit reassuring.

08:55 it's like in chess. Computers have solved so many openings and movesets, but often the optimal move is totally not the best move, because you can't follow up with a random movement pattern thinking 8 rounds ahead

After watching this video, I immediately played today's wordle on 4 July 2023, and opened with the word "CRATE". It just so happened that the last 4 letters - "RATE" were all Green !! A very well made and explained duo of wordle videos. Looking forward to more!

Hey Grant, Excellent video - thank you. I've enjoyed the information theory aspects and the comparison of different search strategies. One thing I'm surprised about is that no one has yet tried to tackle an analysis that involves "hard mode" - in which there are two further requirements: 1) any correct guesses (green) have to remain in future guesses, and 2) and correct letters (yellow) have to be included in future guesses. The question I've had is not which word gets the best overall score but which word has the fewest possible outcomes in which you cannot guess in 6 tries. For example, guessing vowel-heavy words (think ADIEU) is a bad idea - you easily get caught knowing the vowels and not the consonants and don't have enough remaining guesses to distinguish between all possible words.