People share nearly anything online these days — including things that no one would ever have considered sharing publicly years ago. People post about their problems with lovers, their medical problems, their political attitudes, their struggles and triumphs with religion, and their fights with merchants. The express opinions on the mental acuity of presidential candidates,…
If you just try to keep getting better every day, you probably won’t end up the best place for you. Imagine for a moment that you’re taking a walk in the woods. You decide to find a high place that will deliver best possible view. So you follow the obvious method: just keep walking uphill…
I hope you’re having fun solving Wordle puzzles; I know I am. As I attempt the puzzles, I’m often thinking about how vowels and consonants appear in different patterns in five-letter words. I wanted to start exploring those patterns, so I wrote a Python program to probe the results of different patterns. If you want…
Yesterday’s mathematical analysis of the popular word puzzle Wordle was flawed. It assumed that the words used in the puzzle were similar to other word lists, but they’re not — and that changes everything. What word list does Wordle use — and why does that matter? Wordle actually uses two word lists (or properly speaking,…
Wordle, the simple word-guessing game, has become insanely popular. Your job is to guess a common five-letter English word and see which of the letters in your guess are in the unknown word, either in the correct or incorrect location. You can only play once a day, you have six tries, and everyone is guessing…