On Optimal Strategies for Wordle and General Guessing Games

On Optimal Strategies for Wordle and General Guessing Games

Michael Cunanan, Michael Thielscher

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 5541-5548. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/615

The recent popularity of Wordle has revived interest in guessing games. We develop a general method for finding optimal strategies for guessing games while avoiding an exhaustive search. Our main contribution are several theorems that build towards a general theory to prove optimality of a strategy for a guessing game. This work is developed to apply to any guessing game, but we use Wordle as an example to present concrete results.
Keywords:
Search: S: Combinatorial search and optimisation
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MDA: Game playing
Search: S: Applications