Overview

Scott's WordleBot is a half-assed AI for playing Wordle. It is hacky but functional, and supports interactive play (for example in conjunction with the Wordle Website), or batch play for collectin statistics on a new strategy. It has a logging module which can be used to deep-dive the strategies.

Usage

Examples

Interactive Play

env INTERACTIVE=1 WORDS=./wordleWords.mjs ./wordler.mjs refreqflex3

Play a single interactive game using Wordle dictionary and strategy "refreqflex3", with default logging options.

Batch Play

env WORDS=./wordleWords.mjs ./wordler.mjs refreqflex3 10

Play 10 interactive games using Wordle dictionary and strategy "refreqflex3", with default logging options. Statistics will be output

Debug Single Word

env LOG_CONFIG='{"default": "debug", "strategy": "trace"}' ./wordler.mjs refreqflex3 1 woozy

Play a single automatic game with the given solution word, showing debug logs for most modules, and trace logs for the strategy module.

Options

env LOG_CONFIG

Set to a JSON string where keys are modules and values are debugging levels for that module.

Debugging levels:

• trace: Show detailed tracing, plus all below
• debug: Show debug information, plus all below
• info: Show informational logs, plus all below
• warn: Show warnings, plus all below
• error: Show errors, plus all below
• fatal: Show fatals, plus all below

Debugging modules:

• game: Game mechanics
• init: Initialization
• freq: Letter frequency analysis
• lettertrack: Letter tracking
• strategy: Strategy details
• score: Word scoring

Strategies

random

Randomly choose a word which matches the information known so far.

freq

Use a frequency analyzer, and choose the word with the highest score from the frequency analyzer (i.e., the word with the letters seen most frequently in the list of words). Double/Triple/etc. letter occurrences are not scored.

refreq

Use the frequency analyzer as above, but after each guess, create a new frequency analyzer with the remaining possibilities.

doublefreq

Use a smarter scorer that takes into account double/triple/etc. letter occurrences.

doublerefreq

Re-analyze frequency of remaining words as in refreq, but use the improved scorer from doublefreq.

refreqflex

Like the refreq strategy, but be more flexible about choosing words: Instead of guessing only real possibilities, if a not-possible word gets a much better score than a possible one, guess that instead.

refreqflex2

Like the refreqflex strategy, but keep guessing words which may not be possible until we have some threshold of found letters. Experimentation has shown that continuing until we know all letters has the best result, so that is the default.

refreqflex3

Like the refreqflex strategy, but with lots of additional optimizations, including

• Better scoring for double/triple/etc. letter occurences
• Don't award score points for letters we already know about
• If a real possibility scores as well as the best overall word, choose that
• As a score tiebreaker, prefer words with more new letters
• If it is our last turn, always guess a real possibility

This is currently the best strategy, winning 100% of the time on the most recent test run.

refreqflex4

Like refreqflex3, but instead of choosing the highest-scoring word, choose something further down the list. Currently this always does worse unless it is configured to choose the best possible word, which is identical to refreqflex3 and is the default.

The thinking here is that by starting with the most popular letters, we are left with letters that are infrequent and so hard to incorporate into other words; often later guesses only get 1-2 new characters out of all 5. In other words, the very popular letters we will get naturally when guessing other words, so try starting with the least popular ones?

Developing a New Strategy

For a brand new strategy, implement the interface from strategy.mjs, with the two methods defined there.

For a strategy similar to an existing one, extend the existing strategy and override any methods you want to customize.

When you are ready to test, add your strategy to strategyByName.mjs so you can use it from the command-line.

Apologia

This code was written quickly for fun, and is a weird mix of modern JavaScript and whatever popped into my head. It grossly abuses object-oriented paradigms in the interest of quick experimentation, and contains a haphazard minefield of copypasta code.

I don't write production code like this, I promise.

License

This code is placed into the public domain by Scott Gifford [email protected]