The New York Times' Wordle Solver

A java program to help you solve the daily New York Times' Wordle. I remade it in JavaScript and HTML on the 27th of April, 2023, to allow anybody to access it. As of now, the website will only run on laptops/desktops, and doesn't yet support mobile.

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The Process

After playing Wordle for a few days, I realized how much of a learning experience it would be to solve it with code. I set out to find datasets with the accepted Wordle guesses and answers, which I found on Kaggle at this link. Using this data, I developed an algorithm to hone in on words that could be possible guesses. Then, I found another dataset on Kaggle of the frequency English words are used (this link). I imported the data and filtered out any word that is not 5 letters long to maximize the algorithmic efficiency. I then compared each the frequency of each guess being used in normal speech to ensure strange words that are technically valid guesses are not guessed by the bot. For example, "abcee" is a valid Wordle guess, but it clearly will not be the solution. Therefore, by prioritizing popular words, the bot was much more accurate in its guesses.

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The results

I tested some of the best starting words I've seen around the internet, and the one that minimized my average amount of guesses the most was the word "Salet." I found this word from this YouTube video. Currently, the bot takes an average of 3.7 guesses to solve the word, and solves 99.1% of words accurately.

This bot is still far from perfect, and I'm continuing to work on it.

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Here is the list of all Wordle solutions solved using the bot, along with the words it guessed and the number of guesses it took.

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Here is the website with which you can use the solver yourself. So far, the website has no styling or formatting - it's strictly functional. I'll be updating it to make it look nicer in the upcoming weeks, so check back in soon! Meanwhile, feel free to keep using it.