Wordle may seem like a word game, but really it’s a mathematical one. Rather than debate the best opening word, why not calculate it with information theory?

As promised in the video, you can find the top 100 opening words for easy and hard mode, with stupid words included or excluded, here: https://steele.link/top-wordles


Video chapters

00:00 INTRO
01:33 MATHS
02:45 ORDER/CHAOS
06:22 SCARY LOGIC
07:42 SOARE FAILS
10:16 FIRST PLACE


Further viewing

If this video wasn’t nerdy enough for you, @3blue1brown made a deeper dive into the mathematics of entropy as applied to Wordle which came out as I was editing this! Check it out here:    • Solving Wordle using information theory  


Credits

Many thanks to Tran Nguyen for all her help with this video…in particular, for inspiring the graphs showing the entropy of different opening words!

Also many thanks to Jason Liszka for open-sourcing his Wordle-solving code, which I hacked mercilessly to do the calculations for this video: https://github.com/jliszka/wordle


And finally…

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