Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 63: Wordle!

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

In this episode, Bryce and Conor solve a Wordle live!Date Recorded: 2022-01-15Date Released: 2022-02-04Programming Languages Virtual MeetupSeven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce TateJoe ArmstrongScrabble Board GameCarcassonne Board GameWordleMasterMind Board GameWheel of Fortune TV Showwww.wineverygame.comIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Boom! Boom! Boom! Oh, that's a nice one. That's a nice one. That is, that's wonderful. Welcome to ADSP The Podcast, episode 63, recorded on January 15th, 2022. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we solve a Wordle Live. Okay, don't hate me. Sorry, I'm late. Let me turn my mic around. All right. I cut out of the last edit of episode 60, Bryce being 21 minutes late. But that that doesn't matter because today he set

a new record ladies and gentlemen it's 2022 new year new bryce more late than ever 54 minutes to be fair this time like i gave you like a heads up that i was going to be a little bit late admittedly oh i mean yes last time i't know, last time you did too. Did you? I don't know. I don't remember. I felt worse about being late this time, if it makes you feel any better. It's okay.

You don't have to feel bad. I was working on my slide deck for the pre-recording for my meetup on Monday, so. What are you talking about? We're starting a new book, seven languages in seven weeks by Bruce Tate. They cover, what are the seven languages? What are the seven languages?

Yeah. Good question. I probably, no quiz time. Okay. Let's see if I can go through it. Hang on. Seven languages in seven weeks.

I've got it right in front of me. I do have the slide deck on my computer, but it is in the background now. It is a pragmatic guide to learning languages. And hang on. I've got them here. And I assume that they're in order. All right. So why don't you go?

Ruby? Correct. IO? Correct. We're going to go out of order now. We're going to go to the end. Haskell. Yeah, Haskell is the end.

Then Clojure. What position do you think Clojure is at? If you didn't say that was the second one from the end, that means it's third from the end? No, you got it. It was second from the end. It was second from the end? I'm going backwards now. So Ruby, IO, Haskell, Clojure. Scala is one of them. second it was second from the end okay i'm going backwards now uh so ruby io haskell closure uh

scala is one of them prologue's another one yeah that's six and the seventh one i definitely know it i created all the logos for these or not created i put them in a slide deck. What is the seventh one? We'll cut out the silence. Ruby IO, Clojure, Haskell, Scala, Prologue. There's one prototype language, one logic programming language, four functional languages. So what are the functional languages? functional language is closure haskell scala i'm missing a functional language i don't know what is it um it's erlang ah erlang yeah i should have known that because prologue joe armstrong wrote the foreword to the book and and he was consulted on both Erlang and Prologue. He's known for being the creator of Erlang, but for folks that are familiar with Erlang, they'll know that Joe Armstrong first fell in love with Prologue and then basically wanted to

create some kind of concurrent Prologue system. So Erlang is heavily influenced by Prologue, which is well known by folks that know Erlang, but not well known by folks outside of the Erlang is heavily influenced by Prolog, which is well known by folks that know Erlang, but not well known by folks outside of the Erlang world. So you know what we've got to do next? We've got actually, oh, oh, wait. So wait. I like how we both have probably different ideas of what we're going to do next. I know what you're gonna say but that's not actually actually you know what we can come back to what i want to talk about if if we'll do what you want to do and let me guess is it wordle it is where i've been i've been holding off for a full 10 hours and 59 minutes folks let me tell you i do it on so uh avid listeners will remember that Connor is a Scrabble expert because it was like the only game, the only video game that his mother let him play as a kid.

Like, sorry. Computer game. Scrabble. Yeah, only a computer game. Scrabble expert really undersells it. Connor is like a Scrabble savant. Like apparently there's like competitive Scrabble. And I'm just going to go out there and say that Connor is like is ranked. I'm sure he's actually not. But like he could be if you want.

I have actually it's sad. I've been to Carcassonne Nationals. I'll just throw that out there. Canadian Carcassonne Nationals. I've never been to Scrabble Nationals. What is Carcassonne? We'll talk about that in another episode. But for those that know about Carcassonne, they're going to be like, oh, that's cool and very nerdy. Don't look it up. I have a book club with my sister in two hours. So we've got a limited time. I also have plans in three hours. We'll talk about board games. We'll do a board games episode.

Oh, yeah, that'll be awesome. We'll do a board games episode. Oh, yeah, that'll be awesome. We'll do a board games episode in the future. And we have to leave a little time for me to talk to you about my plans because I have a very, very fun. So really, this isn't going to be two hours of recording. It's going to be like 45 minutes of recording, and then we're going to turn off the mics and then chat about other stuff. But yes, I love Scrabble. And I have to say, I absolutely love this game. It's the best. And so the Scrabble skill that I think is going to be most transferable here is going to be in first word selection. Because that is key to being good at Wordle.

Yeah. I've played only eight times. I've never lost yet because I only discovered this eight eight days ago um and i've used the same word every single time it's interesting you just yeah and i bet you you put a lot of thought into what this word is uh a tiny bit but i actually think it's more second second word is more second word selection is more important i think that's where that's where people go but i i feel like first word selection is most important because it's like a shot in the dark, and you need to pick a word that both has letters that have a high frequency of appearing in other words

and also that has letters that appear in positions that they're commonly found in other words. It's like a balancing act between the two. I think it's – I mean, well, like, the reason I think that the second word selection is more important is because I already have my first word selected. I just realized we need to explain briefly what Wordle is for our listeners who might not know. You go ahead, you go ahead.

No, no, no, you got to do it. Okay, Wordle is a combination of Mastermind and Words. It's a brilliantly designed game. Whenever someone comes up with something like this, I'm like, damn it. I could have easily programmed this. But the ingenious of the game is that it's so simple and it's just a twist on a couple different things. So for those of you that don't know, Mastermind is a game where you have eight colors and there's a code maker and a code breaker. And the code maker chooses four pegs. They can either have four unique colors like red, orange, yellow,

green, or they can do red, red, yellow, yellow. Or they can do all, you know, red, red, red, red. And you have like, I think, I don't know what it is, 10 guesses. And basically every time you put down a guess, let's say my first guess is blue, purple, yellow, green. I got yellow and green correct, but in the wrong positions. So there's white pegs to let you know when you've guessed correctly in the wrong place, and there's red pegs to let you know when you've guessed the right color in the right position. And so based on that information over time, you can logically deduce what the know, what the code is, hopefully. Wordle is the same thing, but you're given six guesses in total.

Mastermind, there's a lot more. And you're given five letters. And each time you guess, it will let you know if you have a correct letter in the correct position or a correct letter in the wrong position. And that's about it. So basically, you have six guesses. Typically, I don't think with my first word, I've ever had a complete miss, which is indicative of that my first words being good. But like, the reason why I actually think that the first word's

not that important is because I think that there's a ton of good first words. You could debate whether mine is the best. I think it's a very good one. It's in the top 1%. But does that mean that there's not an actually statistically better one? I don't know the answer to that question. I think the reason that the second word is more important is because a lot of the times when you get, you know, and so green means correct position, correct letter. Yellow means correct letter, wrong position. Usually you get one or two of those. I typically always try to include those in the next guess.

So then the hard part is coming up with a word where the four or three letters that are new letters are also high likelihood letters. Yeah. And a lot of the times finding a word that, you know, fits that criteria isn't always trivial. And yeah. So how are we going to do this? Are we just to play silently no no we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna share our screen and we're gonna we're gonna do this together oh whoa whoa whoa whoa together that but then but then that's going to be cheating that's going to be cheating or so i see we're going to play this together at the same time. So I can

still count this. Yeah. Although, although, see, this is the thing. Are you influencing my picks? Because I'm undefeated. I've never lost this game. I'm eight for eight. Well, well, well, well, yes. This is, this is, we're going to, we're going to demonstrate pair programming and problem solving techniques. I play mine on my phone, so I will play along on my phone. Okay. All right. So what is your first word?

My first word is tears. T-E-A-R-S. Tears. I feel like that's a good one. You've got the S at the end, which is pretty common for words you know, for words. You've got two vowels. Yeah, I like that one. I like that one. All right. All right. So let's, let's see what happens. All right. We've got an A, not in the third place. Okay. So, and this is, this is my strategy is I always try to get, uh, in this case we have,

we have one vowel. So I always, if I've missed both E and the A, I always try and get another vowel. Yeah. Two new vowels being the O and the I. But so like, I think yesterday's word and people can't go back and play this in the past. So it's okay to talk about it. I think yesterday's was tangy. So we got T in the right position yesterday and A in the wrong position. And then my second guess after that was Talon because L, N are two good ones to guess. And then O is I prefer I, but I couldn't really think of a decent word that had an I that also had like an... How many guesses did you get it in yesterday? Yesterday, I got it in three.

Yeah, me too. But from like my second to my third, my third guess being Tangy, like I was not expecting to just get it right there. I don't even know why that came to me, why Tangy came to me. All right, so what are you thinking we should do here? Ideally, what I want is a word with a D, an N, an I. A D, an N, and an I. Why those letters? Because, I mean, if anyone watches Wheel of Fortune in the final round, R, S, T, L,

N, E, I actually don't like L as much, but R, S, T, and N are definitely like very high. Like this is a game of statistics. So D, N, like because D shows up at the end of words all the time. Although now that we don't have an E, it's less likely. But I like an I is A, I, and E are definitely the three most common vowels. So whenever I can get an I in there. So it's all about trying to like optimize. Sorry, say again which letters you want. You want D, I, N.

D, I, N. Reuse the A and put it in a different spot. My first thought was diner, but that's, of course, not good because it wastes two of our letters. Oh, yeah. Never, ever guess a letter that you already know is not there. They even gray it out on your keyboard in order to help you from guessing it again. That's a very – I mean, in some cases, you might have to if you can't think of a word um how about how about um how about no that doesn't fit um so like think of a word that ends in nd yeah that's a good good way to think about it yeah uh like so like another guess actually we

could do and i've actually never done this we could ignore the A for now and guess a word like found. Actually, I don't like found because F is low probability. So you're guessing, I don't like, I need an I. I need the I. You need the I. Although like guessing,

that's a pretty good strategy at this point because we have very little information. How about, so you need an I, yeah. Nadir. That has an R at the end, though. Land. Landy. Yeah, see, that's the problem.

I can think of plenty of words that end with N-D, but they're all four letters. And then I want to stick an S on the end of them, and that doesn't help us. Oh, think of something A, like basin, but without an S in the middle. Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying. Cigar. Also has an R in it. Yeah. We're going to have to cut some of this out.

This is... No, no, no, no. This is all staying in. We're just going to have a Wordle episode. Yeah. Two software engineers. Way overthink playing the game. I feel like we should maybe just do Nadir.

No, we're definitely not guessing a letter. That is a sub-op. I will guess found or hound way before I'll guess. Because we've only got 30 guesses in total. So you're throwing away 3% every single time you reuse a letter that you know is not in it. There's a very limited utility of the utility of each guess is. How about clown? I know it doesn't have your I.

No. W, L, O. W's low probability. Yeah, yeah. I'm now looking at my bookshelf for ideas. P-L-A-I-D. Plaid. Plaid?

You like plaid? Not really. I think there's a better guess out there where they have a P. Oh, no, wait. A is in the same position. I don't like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't do that. That was close. That was close. Wagon is another guess.

That has an O in it, though, not an I. How about, um, disco, which has, but it has an S, so that's no good. Maybe we should just do found what's irritating or is right now i need i need to visualize this as like a scrabble rack with with blanks because like there's definitely a word like basin that is a is blank a blank i blank where one of those is an n for sure i mean we've already thought of a few basin nadir but all of those is an N for sure. I mean, we've already thought of a few,

Basin, Nadir, but all of those either have an R in it or an S in it. So this is why I think the second guess is the hardest because it's like you have a strong set of requirements. I mean, Wagon, technically we could guess Wagon. Wait, what? W-A-G-O-N. I mean, I don't like it because W is very low probability.

Wait, wagon? Did you just say wagon? Yeah. You don't think that's a word? No, I think that that's not how you pronounce that word. Wagon? I think the way that you pronounced it, you said wagon. Wagon?

Wagon? You said wagon. It is pronounced it, you said wagon. Wagon? Wagon? You said wagon. It is on tape that you said wagon. Do I like wagon better than found? I'm trying to think of other words like basin. Cabin? Oh! Cabin.

Cabin? I mean, it doesn't have a D in it. Yeah, I like cabin. Okay, let's do it. We've thought about this long enough. Let's pull the trigger. All right. We've got a C.

Holy fudge. I almost wore it. So we've now got, we put in cabin. The C is yellow, which means there is a C. The A is green, which means that we can. I know what it is. It's definitely in the second position. The B, there's B in the middle, um, uh, which is, uh, which was not a hit. And then there's I,

which is in position and then N, which is, uh, uh, yellow. Um, so we have an N and so now Connor's convinced that he has to recap. It's yellow, green, a miss green, yellow. So we know the A and the I are in the right position and the C and the N are in the wrong position. So we only need to reorganize the C and the N, which we already know there's only two places those can go. I'm almost positive I know what it is. I'll let you figure it out if you can figure it out. And see, I was going to edit out this wordle thinking because I was like, we're wasting our time and this is embarrassing. However, clearly, clearly spending all that time on guest number two, we, we, oh, this is beautiful because it validates my whole theory of like the second guest is important and it's about statistics.

If you want a hint about what the word means. Nope, nope, nope, no hints, no hints. I have to look, I have to look smart on this show, too. Let's calculate how many actual possibilities there are. The C can go in two places. The N can go in two places. Yeah. And then that means that there's, we've guessed, nine distinct letters.

And so we assume that all 26 minus 9 is 17. So 17 times 2 times 2, I think. Or it's actually not 2 times 2 because when the C goes in one position. Is it panic? That's my guess, yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, are we putting it in? Yeah, let's do it.

Are we going to do wordle every episode now we might have to boom boom boom oh that's a nice one that's a nice one that is that's wonderful yeah see oh you that's you don't do it from the same device that's what i mean is that i always do it from my phone oh i'll. I'll go do it from my phone later. Because then it keeps the stats. Oh, wait, wait. If I do it from my phone, now I have to remember what I put in, what we put in. That's great.

I love it. What was the other word that started with a P that we were thinking about? I can't remember. Plaid. Plaid. Oh, yeah. Plaid would have been fantastic as well. Not as good as cabin.

Tears, cabin. But, yeah, so while have been fantastic as well. Not as good as Cabin. Tears, Cabin. But yeah, so while Bryce is typing that stuff in, in Scrabble, I think one of the, here, let me, let me, oh yeah, and actually what we'll do, I'll screen share, and that's the thing is, we were thinking about it for a while,

but I guarantee you that there's like 200 words that follow the blank A, blank I. So here, let me quickly screen share. And what I was going to say was that in Scrabble, one of the most statistically likely to make a bingo using all seven of your letters is like satire with a D, I think. So I'm at wineverygame.com. This is like a word generator site. So if we go blank, A blank, I blank, and then we put that as the prefix so it has to show up in that order, we're going to get – I can't even count how many. Actually, we should copy it into Excel. Yeah, cabins there.

It is 64 times 2 is 128 minus 1 is 127 words. Although if you omit the ones, it would actually be interesting if we omit the ones that don't have S's, R's, and T's in them, how many are left? I'll figure that out afterwards and

attach it to the end of this episode because I have a little Scrabble program where I can... So this is Connor from the future. The answer to how many words have either an A or an I in the second or fourth location is 49. I'm obviously not going to read all those out, but that is based on the Scrabble dictionary. In the Wordle dictionary, which only has a fraction of the Scrabble words, roughly 2,le dictionary, which only has a fraction of the Scrabble words, roughly 2,500, there is actually only eight, and I'll read those out. So those were cabin, which is the one we ended up choosing, manic, valid, magic, cavil, panic, vapid, and final. I knew all of those words except for cavil, which I looked up and means to carp, which that means to find fault unreasonably.

Back to past Connor. Oh, yeah. And then if we go... Wait, wait, wait. Go back. Is this the sheet? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're looking at the plan tab of my portfolio of words spreadsheet.

And it's got 2021. Oh, wait. We got to update that. This is we're looking at the plan tab of my portfolio of words spreadsheet. And it's got 2021. Oh, wait, we got to update that. This is 2022, 2023. Obviously, I mean, everything has been updated. I've already read three books, watched 17 hours of lectures. You're making me feel so lazy. We're 664% ahead of our reading goals and 235% ahead of our lecture watching goals. There must be errors in those formulas.

Nope. We can switch to the videos tab and actually watch the list of all. Look at all the lists. Like this year is like to stop taking naps on the couch on my couch in this morning and to not kill these little air plants that that my skip level sent to our whole team. I think I'm failing on both counts. I can't. So I can't figure out. This is definitely not the most likely seven letters but like

retains if you have the letters for that words r-e-t-a-i-n-s without a blank letter you can spell nine different seven letter words most of which I don't know anestry, antsier, nastier, retines

retains, retinas retcetsina, Stainer, and Steerin. Anyways, enough about Scrabble and Wordle. I absolutely love this game. Nine for nine, undefeated. And I didn't realize, I thought that word that like, is it true that the guy's name is Wordle? I have no idea. All i've heard in the news is that he may said he's not going to ever put ads on it and he's going to keep it simple and free and then i know one other group of people or company tried to rip the game off and then they ended up backpedaling and taking the game down saying that they apologized and um i just i love when games like these come out and this one's got to be my favorite because it's such a simple idea.

His last name is Wardle with an A. So so the name of the of the game is very clever because like it just seems like a, you know, a cute name for like a word game. But it's also like, you know, pretty close to his last name yeah what i think is is a missed opportunity is that there's no like you can only like the the sharing of the little emojis stuff is really really cute but like uh there's no sort of leaderboard friend thing like you can't sort of he should have amplified it a tiny bit more because then we definitely would be on the same little leaderboard of whatever c++ or n Nvidia people. And, and we'd get to,

we get to see each other's. I think it's, it's, it's, I think no, the fact that it's simple and elegant, like in pure is one of the reasons why it's a successful thing. Yeah.

And actually maybe, maybe not amplifying it is what people leads people to Twitter to tweet it. Cause that's the only way you can kind of share it. So maybe it maybe it actually has become a more popular and viral because of that. That's a good point. All right. How long we've been recording for 27 minutes already. So we're going to we're going to we're going to do our looking ahead at the year 2022 in a second episode. So this is now we're supposed to do that last weekend? We were, but then... So we've already got like one or two episodes in the backlog.

This is either episode 62 or three, depending on how I edit things. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.