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 word 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 strategy, itself a strategy, executes
all child strategies concurrently on the same word list and combines the results by accumulating
each word's normalised rank position across every child strategy. Because this combination is a
simple sum — a commutative operation — the order in which strategies are specified does not
matter. chain{frequency,position} and chain{position,frequency} produce identical output.
This also means the pill-toggle selector in the web solver works perfectly: selecting or deselecting strategies in any order gives the same result as specifying them on the CLI in any order.
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 |