Effective Wordle Heuristics
Abstract
While previous researchers have performed an exhaustive search to determine an optimal Wordle strategy, that computation is very time consuming and produced a strategy using words that are unfamiliar to most people. With Wordle solutions being gradually eliminated (with a new puzzle each day and no reuse), an improved strategy could be generated each day, but the computation time makes a daily exhaustive search impractical. This paper shows that simple heuristics allow for fast generation of effective strategies and that little is lost by guessing only words that are possible solution words rather than more obscure words.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2408.11730,
title = {Effective Wordle Heuristics},
author = {Ronald I. Greenberg},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.11730},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
7 pages including references, 4 tables. The 2/12/26 version updates the 8/21/24 original by clarifying the relationship between entropy and the L_p norm in Section 2.1 and by adding a brief postscript section