About Wicked Wordle
How to Play
Wicked Wordle plays like regular Wordle: guess a secret 5-letter word, one guess at a time. After each guess, the letters are colored to give you feedback:
- Green — The letter is correct and in the right position
- Yellow — The letter is in the word but in the wrong position
- Gray — The letter is not in the word
Keep guessing until all five letters are green — that means you've found the word!
What Makes It Wicked
There is no fixed target word. Instead, after every guess you make, the computer secretly changes the target word to whichever valid word is hardest for you to find given everything you know so far.
The computer is an adversary. It will try to make it as hard as possible to narrow down remaining possible words.
The hints it shows you are always consistent with the word it has just chosen. It can never contradict a previous hint, so you can still use logic to narrow things down.
Can You Win?
Yes — but it may take many guesses! My personal best score is 4 guesses. If you're really stuck, just keep guessing words with at least one new letter. Eventually you'll have all the letters and you should be able to solve it.
The Computer's Logic
The strategy that the computer calculates is as follows. It looks at every possible hint that it could give to the latest guess. Then, it picks the hint that would leave the most remaining possible words as a solution. In this way, the computer tries to maximize the number of guesses required to get the solution. Is this strategy optimal for the computer? Probably not -- it's a pretty good strategy, but what it's maximizing (the number of remaining words) is not exactly the same as maximizing the number of guesses required to solve it. To do that, some sort of minimax algorithm would be required, and I'm too lazy to do that right now.
Inspiration
Wicked Wordle was inspired by HATETRIS, a version of Tetris that always gives you the worst possible piece.