An Exact Solution to Wordle

Abstract

Optimal Strategies for Wordle and its Variants Motivated by the recent, explosive popularity of Wordle and a suite of suboptimal attempts to solve the game, “An Exact Solution to Wordle,” by Dimitris Bertsimas and Alex Paskov, proposes a new and scalable framework to exactly solve Wordle and any of its variants. Namely through modeling the game as a finite-state Markov decision process and deriving several theoretical and computational speed-ups, Bertsimas and Paskov outline an algorithm to solve the game. Ultimately, they find that “SALET” is the best starting word and that the best strategy solves the game in 3.42 moves in expectation. Results and analysis are also extended for recent variants and settings, such as Wordle Hard Mode or optimizing against a worst-case situation.