The strategies outlined here will all lead to finding the solution, but will get there in different ways. Experiment with different strategies and see what is the most fun for your personal style of play. If you aren't interested and just want a good hint, use the defaults.

Letter Match

This strategy is intuitive and how most people play Wordle. The idea is to choose words that have letters which are found most frequently in the solution set words, and more accurately choose words that have their letters in frequent locations. This algorithm scores each word in the valid guess set (guesses and solutions) against all the words in the possible solutions set. The score is normalized by dividing the total score by the size of the solution set.

Word scoring: 3 points for an exact match; 2 points for a letter that is included in the solution but incorrectly placed (credit is only given up to the total number of occurrences of the letter in the solution word matching the total number of occurrences in the guess word); 1 point for an incorrect letter as it eliminates solutions from the solution space; 0 points for repeat letters in the guess word that provide no additional info. The point values are somewhat arbitrary, and it is debatable whether two misplaced letters are more valuable than a single correctly placed letter, but most importantly:

A perfect score is 15 indicating that the solution has been found.

For a more thorough explanation of the information theory behind this and the original idea for the scoring algorithm, read this medium.com article.

Reduce Solution Space

This strategy is less intuitive. Instead of choosing a guess word that has a lot of letters to likely match the solution, we pick a word where the average solution space size is the smallest after making the guess. Since we don't know what the solution is, we choose a word from the solution set and determine what the Wordle feedback for our guess would be. We can then reduce the solution set by the new cumulative known info set and count its size. Repeat for all words in the original solution set and average for the expected size after making the guess.

The score reported is the average size of the solution set after making the guess, so the perfect score is 1.00 but this doesn't mean the solution has been found. Consider a solver with the known info

with strategy
Reduce Solution Space
Known Information in Guesses
Use Only Valid Solutions as Guesses

There would be only three remaining solutions: SASSY, SISSY, and SUSHI. Using any of them as the guess would leave only one possibility if it were not the solution itself.

Warning: This is computationaly expensive and will run a long time if you have zero known information in the solver. If you are using only valid solutions, choose RAISE as the first guess. If not restricting to only valid solutions, choose ROATE.

Use Known Information in Guesses

The solution space is always reduced by whatever information you have entered into the solver before computing the guesses. Toggling this on will similarly restrict the guess words used. E.g. if you have already made a guess and got the first letter correct as S then only guesses with the first letter S will be used.

If this is toggled off, the known information will be ignored and all guesses will be considered. This sometimes results in high-ranking words with Is Soln = false.

Use Only Valid Solutions as Guesses

Wordle uses two dictionaries. One is the set of words that can be the solution to the puzzle, and a second that it will allow as guesses but can't ever be the solution. Toggling this on restricts the words scored to only the solutions dictionary. The best guess is not always something that could be a solution!

The Temporal Nature of Wordle Feedback

Wordle will only give misplaced letters credit up to the number of occurrences in the solution word. E.g. if the solution is and the guess is only the first occurrence of S is coded yellow. Because Wordle only provides feedback one guess at a time, it is possible for letters coded as misplaced to become misses if they landed in the correct location elsewhere on a subsequent guess. E.g. if the solution is and the guesses are Then we would enter into the solver Since the solver doesn't know what words you guessed and in what order, we can't tell how many S's there are. Did the S become the S? Don't know. If we knew the order of guesses and specific feedback to each guess, we could sometimes infer that there is only one S, but in this case we can't. In fact, the only way to make the solver understand exactly one S would be to put S into all the other spaces which is feedback Wordle never directly gave us.

How much does this matter? Not much as it turns out. If we choose Letter Match and Use Only Valid Solutions as Guesses as our strategies, the results are nearly identical. We overinclude by only two words, SENSE and SISSY, taking us from 28 to 30 possible solutions, and the extra words are are both dead last in rank.

So we make a minor trade gaining ease of use inputting data into the solver against perfect results.

Gotcha: Be careful with guess words that have a double letter but only one of them is a hit. If you enter the second one in INCORRECT you'll get no results. A letter cannot simultaneously be in the word and not in the word!

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