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Strategies

Strategies

qordle supports a number of different word selection strategies as documented below. The strategies are designed to be composable via chaining.

alpha

The alpha strategy sorts the word list alphabetically

bigram

The bigram strategy sums the bigrams for each wordin using the bigram frequency table and sorts the word list highest to lowest

elimination

Note: This strategy is far slower than the rest so best used when the word list has been filtered.

The elimination strategy uses each word in the word list as a secret and scores all the remaining words against it. The accumulated sum for the letter & position from position frequency table is used for sorting.

  • the table value for a Misplaced position
  • two times the table value for an Exact position

frequency

The frequency strategy iterates the word list accumulating the letter frequency for all remaining words in the list. Each word is then scored by summing its letter frequencies.

position

The position strategy, similar to the frequency strategy, iterates the word list accumulating the position frequency for each letter. Each word is then scored by summing its letter position.

speculation

The speculation strategy is used for solving "guessing games", those situation when all remaining words differ by only a single letter. The strategy iterates the word list accumulating the differing letter and then generates a word list from those words composed of the unknown letters.

Chaining

All strategies are composable via chaining. The chaining, itself a strategy, executes all child strategies and sorts by accumulating the word rank in resulting word list.

Performance

The following table shows the number of winning rounds from 2000 randomly chosen words using different strategies.

strategy winners total pct
speculate{chain{frequency,position}} 1870 2000 93.5
speculate{chain{frequency,elimination}} 1860 2000 93.0
speculate{chain{frequency,position,bigram,elimination}} 1858 2000 92.9
speculate{chain{frequency,position,bigram}} 1858 2000 92.9
speculate{chain{frequency,elimination,bigram}} 1851 2000 92.5
speculate{chain{frequency,bigram}} 1846 2000 92.3
speculate{elimination} 1839 2000 92.0
speculate{frequency} 1834 2000 91.7
speculate{position} 1778 2000 88.9
speculate{bigram} 1597 2000 79.8