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I'm a sucker for logic puzzles. I download the Daily Sudoku, tackle the Cryptoquote. I do the weekly Jonesin' crossword puzzle in the local free paper, though I don't bother with the NY Times. Too many pop-culture references I have no clue about.
So I guess it's no surprise that I eventually followed the buzz and looked into Wordle.
For the three of you who haven't tried it yet, it's a word guessing game. You get six tries to identify a five-letter word. It tells you what letters you've guessed correctly, and whether they're in the right places. I hit lucky my first play, answered on the second guess. So now I'm hooked.
So far, I've played eleven or twelve times, and solved it every time. Usually on the fourth guess, sometimes fifth. Only once did I go out to the sixth line. ("Robin" is surprisingly non-evident from "_o_in.") But I have an unfair advantage.
When I was in grade school, I was fascinated by codes and ciphers. Wrote a lot of alphabets, even came up with a really solid transposition cipher involving a random number sequence on a disc, so the key kept changing. And I memorized the first part of the table of English letter frequencies.
You see, in a large enough sample of text, letters occur in a predictable order. E T O A N I S H R D L U... and so forth. So if your cipher text conforms to the sequence, it's probably just transposed. If not, there's substitution going on, and you can sometimes figure out which letter is which by how often it's used. Fascinating to fifth-grade me.
But that means, now, that if I start with a word from the most frequent letters--ATONE, for example, I can usually get a couple of letters right off the bat. Pick another word that includes them and the rest of the common letters, narrow it down more. Make sure to go through all the vowels, and put known letters in different spots until you found the right ones. Eventually, you get enough clues to pick out the word, hopefully before you run out of guesses.
Sometimes, it's a near thing. This morning, I had "_ _ni_," with A E O U eliminated. I really needed another vowel... oh. "Cynic," on my fifth try.
Damn thing is addictive. I'm lucky they only drop one a day.
ETA: And no, I don't post my results anywhere. Though I do share with Denise when I'm feeling particularly clever.
So I guess it's no surprise that I eventually followed the buzz and looked into Wordle.
For the three of you who haven't tried it yet, it's a word guessing game. You get six tries to identify a five-letter word. It tells you what letters you've guessed correctly, and whether they're in the right places. I hit lucky my first play, answered on the second guess. So now I'm hooked.
So far, I've played eleven or twelve times, and solved it every time. Usually on the fourth guess, sometimes fifth. Only once did I go out to the sixth line. ("Robin" is surprisingly non-evident from "_o_in.") But I have an unfair advantage.
When I was in grade school, I was fascinated by codes and ciphers. Wrote a lot of alphabets, even came up with a really solid transposition cipher involving a random number sequence on a disc, so the key kept changing. And I memorized the first part of the table of English letter frequencies.
You see, in a large enough sample of text, letters occur in a predictable order. E T O A N I S H R D L U... and so forth. So if your cipher text conforms to the sequence, it's probably just transposed. If not, there's substitution going on, and you can sometimes figure out which letter is which by how often it's used. Fascinating to fifth-grade me.
But that means, now, that if I start with a word from the most frequent letters--ATONE, for example, I can usually get a couple of letters right off the bat. Pick another word that includes them and the rest of the common letters, narrow it down more. Make sure to go through all the vowels, and put known letters in different spots until you found the right ones. Eventually, you get enough clues to pick out the word, hopefully before you run out of guesses.
Sometimes, it's a near thing. This morning, I had "_ _ni_," with A E O U eliminated. I really needed another vowel... oh. "Cynic," on my fifth try.
Damn thing is addictive. I'm lucky they only drop one a day.
ETA: And no, I don't post my results anywhere. Though I do share with Denise when I'm feeling particularly clever.
