Sanuli-konuli - Wordle solver
Sunday, February 6. 2022
Wordle is a popular word game. In just a couple months the popularity rose so fast New York Times bought the whole thing from Josh Wardle, the original author.
As always, a popular game gets the cloners moving. Also another thing about Worlde is the English language. What if somebody (like me) isn't a native speaker. It is very difficult in the middle of a game to come up with a word like "skirl". There is an obvious need for localized versions. In Finland, such a clone is Sanuli. A word-game, a clone of Wordle, but with Finnish words.
From software engineering point-of-view, this is a simple enough problem to solve. Get a dictionary of words, filter out all 5-letter words, store them to a list for filtering by game criteria. And that's exactly what I did in my "word machine", https://github.com/HQJaTu/sanuli-konuli/.
The code is generic to support any language and any dictionary.
Example Wordle game
Attempt #1
To get the initial word, I ran:
./cli-utils/get-initial-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat.
Command's output was a randomly selected word "mucor".
As seen above, that resulted all gray tiles. No matches.
Attempt #2
Second attempt with excluded lettes:
get-initial-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat "mucor".
Command's output was a randomly selected word "slake".
This time game started boucing my way! First letter 'S' is on green and two yellow ones for 'L' and 'K'.
Attempt #3
Third attempt wasn't for initial word, this time I had clues to narrow down the word. A command to do this with above clues would be:
find-matching-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat "s...." "ae" ".l.k."
Out of multiple possible options, a randomly selected word matching criteria was: "skirl"
Nice result there! Four green ones.
Note: Later, when writing this blog post, I realized the command has an obvious flaw. I should have excluded all known gray letters "mucore". Should my command have been:
find-matching-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat "s...." "mucorae" ".l.k."
The ONLY matching word would have been "skill" at this point.
Attempt #4 - Win!
Applying all the green letters, the command to run would be:
find-matching-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat "ski.l" "ar" "....."
This results in a single word: "skill" which will win the game!
Finally
I've been told this brute-force approach of mine takes tons of joy out of the word-game. You have to forgive me, my hacker brain is wired to instantly think of a software solution to a problem not needing one. 
Wordle is a popular word game. In just a couple months the popularity rose so fast New York Times bought the whole thing from Josh Wardle, the original author.
As always, a popular game gets the cloners moving. Also another thing about Worlde is the English language. What if somebody (like me) isn't a native speaker. It is very difficult in the middle of a game to come up with a word like "skirl". There is an obvious need for localized versions. In Finland, such a clone is Sanuli. A word-game, a clone of Wordle, but with Finnish words.
From software engineering point-of-view, this is a simple enough problem to solve. Get a dictionary of words, filter out all 5-letter words, store them to a list for filtering by game criteria. And that's exactly what I did in my "word machine", https://github.com/HQJaTu/sanuli-konuli/.
The code is generic to support any language and any dictionary.
Example Wordle game
Attempt #1
To get the initial word, I ran:
./cli-utils/get-initial-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat.
Command's output was a randomly selected word "mucor".
As seen above, that resulted all gray tiles. No matches.
Attempt #2
Second attempt with excluded lettes:
get-initial-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat "mucor".
Command's output was a randomly selected word "slake".
This time game started boucing my way! First letter 'S' is on green and two yellow ones for 'L' and 'K'.
Attempt #3
Third attempt wasn't for initial word, this time I had clues to narrow down the word. A command to do this with above clues would be:
find-matching-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat "s...." "ae" ".l.k."
Out of multiple possible options, a randomly selected word matching criteria was: "skirl"
Nice result there! Four green ones.
Note: Later, when writing this blog post, I realized the command has an obvious flaw. I should have excluded all known gray letters "mucore". Should my command have been:
find-matching-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat "s...." "mucorae" ".l.k."
The ONLY matching word would have been "skill" at this point.
Attempt #4 - Win!
Applying all the green letters, the command to run would be:
find-matching-word.py words/nltk-wordnet2021-5-words_v1.dat "ski.l" "ar" "....."
This results in a single word: "skill" which will win the game!
Finally
I've been told this brute-force approach of mine takes tons of joy out of the word-game. You have to forgive me, my hacker brain is wired to instantly think of a software solution to a problem not needing one.
