In the part of the world I live in, avocados come from grocery stores and they’re never ripe. When I bring them home, they sit on the counter for days. I’m all set to use them, but those avocados – the main ingredient, the star of the soon-to-be-guacamole show – are defiantly unworkable.
Until they’re not.
And then that day, that hour, everything happens at once. The tomatoes, onions, cilantro, and garlic must be chopped. The limes juiced. The salt shaken. There’s work to do to turn those avocados into guacamole, and that work needs to happen now. As much as I’d like to plan, prepare, and absolutely positively not have to rush ever – it just makes no sense to chop cilantro on Monday in the anticipation of Thursday’s guacamole.
Some projects are guacamole.
These are the projects where their outcome would be decidedly worse if you started early. To do the best work you really do have to wait (and wait) for some event to trigger before you can start. And then you better hope you stretched that morning because it. is. on.
These are the worst projects, avoid them.
And they are largely avoidable. Sure some guacamole projects are inevitable – I have yet to figure out how to automatically ripen an avocado for example – but there’s almost always something you can do to get ahead of the game.
Try to get ahead of the game.
According to the NYT, few players use a consistent starting word when playing Wordle. Of the 28% of players (with more than 10 games played) who have used the same starting word 90% of the time, the words are: ADIEU, AUDIO, STARE, RAISE, and ARISE.
Full disclosure: I’m pretty sure I’m in this sample group and RAISE is my starting word.
Many months ago at the outset of the Wordle craze, long before the NYT bought it, I wrote a Wordle solver — a computer program that will play Wordle against itself and keep lots of fun statistics about those games.
To folks in reading this in the far future: This is the sort of activity the pandemic forced us into.
I’ll save the details of how the Wordle solver works for another post (short version: it does same math as it would if it were solving Mastermind), but I was curious how these words would perform against each other. So I took my solver, looked up a few other sources for “best starting words” and simulated 100,000 games with each of them.
Would my RAISE come out on top?
|
Word |
Win Percentage |
Average Number of Rounds |
± Rounds |
| 1 |
slant |
86.65% |
4.9680 |
1.51 |
| 2 |
trace |
85.37% |
5.0417 |
1.57 |
| 3 |
crate |
85.36% |
5.0340 |
1.57 |
| 4 |
crane |
84.93% |
5.0744 |
1.60 |
| 5 |
piano |
84.65% |
5.1039 |
1.55 |
| 6 |
slate |
84.02% |
5.0526 |
1.62 |
| 7 |
audio |
83.74% |
5.1774 |
1.56 |
| 8 |
stare |
82.95% |
5.1180 |
1.66 |
| 9 |
snare |
82.62% |
5.1358 |
1.67 |
| 10 |
roate |
82.59% |
5.1500 |
1.69 |
| 11 |
tears |
82.43% |
5.1214 |
1.71 |
| 12 |
yuppy |
82.12% |
5.4342 |
1.35 |
| 13 |
adieu |
81.84% |
5.2540 |
1.64 |
| 14 |
soare |
81.21% |
5.2077 |
1.71 |
| 15 |
raise |
80.01% |
5.2551 |
1.79 |
| 16 |
quest |
79.98% |
5.3882 |
1.67 |
| 17 |
arise |
79.72% |
5.2750 |
1.81 |
No. No it didn’t. It came in a very (very) sad 15th place out of 17.
So I guess I need to change my starting word to SLANT? With a 6% better win rate, it seems silly not to.
To define what’s going on in that table a little better — “Win Percentage” is the number of times the solver was able to guess the right word by the 6th guess (inclusive), and “Average Number of Rounds” is the average number of rounds it took to solve the puzzle (I let the program keep solving past 6 rounds just so that it doesn’t get discouraged).
Which all adds up to “RAISE” is a bad choice for a starting word. Old habits die hard though, so despite it being suboptimal I know I’m going to have a hard time changing.
I should note, all of these games are played on “hard mode” — which is to say every guess must use all of the information from all of the previous guesses. If the solver knows a word has an “E” in it, it won’t guess “COUNT” for example.
Maybe the next experiment with the solver should be removing the hard mode restriction? What happens if, instead of just specifying the first guess, the first two guesses are scripted to be words that contain different letters from one another? For example, like “RAISE” as a first guess and “COUNT” for the next guess. Would that increase the win percentage? Would the number of rounds to solve the puzzle go up because it’s more often than not throwing away one extra guess?
