For those of you new to Quordle, a brief explanation of the game can be found here. The basic idea is that there are four five-letter words, and you make guesses that apply to all four; the program tells you when a letter is in each word and if it is in the correct position. To succeed you must identify all four words in nine guesses or less. My first Quordle article had a discussion on how to use letter frequencies in five-letter words to choose starting or seed words.
If you do not get all four words in nine guesses, we call it “chumping.” The number of words you don’t get in nine guesses determines the level of chumping (single, double, etc.). There have been a number of triple-chumps, but no Glib has quadruple-chumped in a posted score, although there was a claim of doing that in a practice round (I won’t name names). The Hyperbole wondered (paraphrasing here) if a quadruple chump would be likely or, alternatively, hard to get, if you made a legitimate attempt, i.e., don’t put letters where you already know they aren’t allowed, but use bad seed words. My thought was that perhaps if your seed words were bad enough, it might pretty much guarantee a quadruple chump even if you were trying not to lose (other than choosing bad seed words).
Not wanting to have a question like that go unanswered, I set out to find bad seed words and see If they ensured a chump. For reference, my standard seed words are CARET/LOINS/DUMPY, although if the first word or two gets enough hits, I may not use all three. To find good seed words I looked for letters with high frequencies in five-letter words, and also words that have those letters in the positions they are more likely to occur. The dictionary I used to find the 5197 five-letter words in these analyses was one I found on the University of Michigan website.
For bad seed words, of course we want low frequencies. The only restrictions are that the seed words must be real words recognized by Quordle, and the seed words cannot have repeat letters, since that would be wasting a letter. This latter requirement might be debatable, since using a letter more than once might help find its exact position, which is helpful in pinning down the correct word. But for this attempt, that’s the rule I will use.
Without going into detail, the seeds I came up with are QUICK/ZLOTY/WAXEN (yes, ZLOTY, the Polish currency, is accepted by Quordle). The order is in increasing frequency, i.e., the first seed QUICK has the lowest frequency, etc. This combination has both overall and exact-position frequencies that are about 75% of my standard seed words, although the much of it comes from the third seed WAXEN, which has the common letters A, E, and N.
The real test is how these “bad” seeds do in actual use. I played six practice games using QUICK/ZLOTY/WAXEN. Although QUICK does not do nearly as well as CARET, nor does QUICK/ZLOTY do as well as CARET/LOINS, I found that there was still enough information in four of the six games to not need the third seed to get at least one word correct. In one of those cases I never even needed to use WAXEN. My scores ranged from 18 to 27, with an average of 23, and there were no chumps. (The numerical score is determined by how many guesses it takes to get each of the four words; e.g., if you get the four words in the 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 8th guesses, your score is 22. A word that is not guessed by the ninth guess gets a score of 100. A “perfect” quadruple chump would have a score of 400.)
My take-away from this is that even with bad seed words, if you try your best to find the correct words, you generally can complete the puzzle in nine guesses or less.
Trashy encouraged me to find the complete Wordle word list, from which Quordle words are supposedly taken. I found them (2317 words) and will report my findings in another article.
As an update, I won’t write a full article on it, but I have taken the Wordle word list, from which Quordle words are supposedly taken, and done my probability analysis on it. Long story short, aside from the seed words I have mentioned before, I found that SLATE/CRONY/HUMID does exceptionally well at finding letters in their correct place. Most of the letters are in their most likely or second most likely positions. They also do very well overall.
My handicap is vodka, apparently.
“Parade of horrors”
Daily Quordle 141
9️⃣8️⃣
4️⃣?
quordle.com
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜?⬜?⬜ ⬜??⬜?
⬜⬜??⬜ ⬜?⬜?⬜
?⬜⬜?⬜ ⬜?⬜?⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜? ???⬜?
⬜⬜⬜?? ???⬜?
⬜⬜⬜⬜? ???⬜?
⬜⬜⬜⬜? ?????
????? ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬜?⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜?⬜
⬜???⬜ ⬜⬜?⬜⬜
⬜???? ⬜?⬜⬜⬜
????? ⬜??⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜?⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜?⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜?⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜?⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬜⬜⬜⬜?
PS. whoever suggested the two seed words I used today can eat a bag of dicks.
Glibs is acting funky (and not in the good way) so I’m holding off on posting the DQR as some of you people have longish no=chump streaks at stake. Also I need Grumbletarian’s score or l0b0t will win by default and no one likes to win by default. If I get drunk and don’t get back to post later, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that I scored a 16 today and Cannoli beat Mike S in the other final four match.
Yeah, my clipboard is getting a workout this evening.
Feel free to omit my score 🙂
JK
Strange. All kinds of issues on the phone. I sat down to a proper PC and it appears to be working.
I still get the “internal error” page every so often when I reload or switch to earlier posts.
Yes, it just happened again.
me too.
I won’t post mine today because I saw one of employees playing over lunch and I picked up at least two of the words.
Honor is not allowed
Did you finish it anyway? When I saw two words, I still only got an 18. Sad.
57
89
For today
?
I was playing with the dict list found in *nix systems – there are 8,497 words on it.
“Zloty” is there, of course, but I have to admit I’m not quite sure of the meanings of “zoeal”, “zogan”, “zoril”, “zudda”, and one or two others.
Only one or two? 🙂
A number of the weird words in the much longer lists are not accepted by Quordle.
I just checked my real dictionary and one of the four head-scratchers I listed is actually a word. Guess which one!
But yeah, the *nix list is so ridiculous.
zoeal, is legitimate and often useful in Scrabble.
I wish my Dictionary app had a Scrabble Dictionary available. I used to love browsing that thing when I was kid. All those oddities and the swear words.
(Hmph. Apparently there is a separate app in the App Store but no thanks.)
Oh, the answer was supposed to be “zoril”. At least, that’s the one found in “New Oxford American Dictionary”.
yes, ZLOTY, the Polish currency, is accepted by Quordle
I like this.
I found a different dictionary, on Github, which contains a total of 15920 5-letter words, but which includes plurals, which I’m trying to filter out.
Is the Wordle/Quordle dictionary really only 2137 words, and if so, what reasoning allows this?
The complete Wordle list is 2317; after they have been used up, Wordle is over, as I understand it (in 2024). People have speculated that only Wordle words are used in Quordle, and as far as I know, that’s held true so far. Since Quordle uses 4 words a day, either it will use them up sooner or they will have to start reusing them.
There are two wordle lists out there. The 2300-ish long one is all of the wordle solutions past, present, and future. I use that list with QuordleBot and haven’t had any words not show up on the list yet. There’s a much longer (10 or 11k?) list of wordle accepted words, but most of them are weird and wouldn’t really be guessed by humans.
This one?
Yup
Am I the only one that thinks it’s kind of a shit move by the creator to have acceptable words that aren’t possible answers?
The whole thing seems more art than science to me.
Imagine the outcry if one of the solution words was “zogan” or “zudda”.
Yeah they have to draw a line somewhere, but I’d think if a word isn’t going to be a possible solution than it shouldn’t be allowed as a guess, may as well let people try ABCDE and FGHIJ.
Yah, agree on that.
Quordle doesn’t seem to use plurals or other inflected forms (like “acted” or “aping”).
quordle just used “APING” in a practice game I am playing right not, no shit.
Well, that ain’t right.
Yes, there are only 37 Wordle words ending in “s” and none are plurals (or first person verbs like “jumps”). There are 23 words ending in “ed”, including “cried”, “dried”, “fried”, “plied”, “pried”, “shied”, “spied”, and “tried”. There are 23 words ending in “ing”, including “aping”, “aging”, “being”, “doing”, “dying”, “eking”, “eying”, “going”, “lying”, “owing”, “suing”, “tying”, “using”, and “vying”.
So, plurals* bad. Past tense good, gerund good. They’ve got some ‘splaining to do.
*Apparently not all plurals *cough radii?! cough*
Though I have to admit I don’t think I’ve ever seen a past tense or gerund in a Quordle solution.
I think we need a bot to play practice quordle games to extract the whole dictionary.
Good idea.
BIG NOTE: I just played a quordle practice game that included “RADII” which is a disallowed word in Wordle, so the dictionaries are likely different.
Even the dictionary that Trashy uses in QuordleBot doesn’t include RADII.
Radii is in the Wordle list and accepted by Quordle (at least in a practice game).
hmm, well it’s at least not in Trashy’s dictionary.
I believe the only way we will see a quad-chump is on purpose.
Oh ye of little faith
We should do our first Glibcast with guest stars Trshmnstr and Whiz to discuss Quordle.
Topical, popular, and nerdy all at once.
Seems his word list (Quordle guy) is straight in the code not hidden….unless its a ruse.
And I agree. Let’s pull the trigger!
OK, so I don’t appear to be able to schedule a rumble stream more than 24 hours in the future, so let’s see when we can do this. I’m actually going to be busy this Friday evening and probably Saturday. Thursday’s no good. We should probably do a brief outline of the topics and estimate a duration.
Yeah some prep would be good. Wednesday, Sunday or Monday would work
Actually Friday might work–some plans have changed…
You could get the Quordle guy on, he answers questions fairly often on twitter, you could convince him of our superior scoring system and I also get the notion that he’s a bit of a lib so you could switch to politics and torment him if the Quordle talk gets boring.
I may have broken Glibs; having a lot of trouble posting.
Yeah I’m giving up for the night
Working on it.
ETA: Shit, I’m now showing up as WebDom.
–Mojo
This is some Freaky Friday type thing, right?
Choose the form of your destructor!
Por que no los dos?
Manny Moe and Jack?
I’m so confused.
Show off.
…
?
Can I post from my tablet?
Working on it.
Thanks Moj!
USMNT at it again – this time it counts! But what a shit-show. The field looks like slop and the El Salvadorites are out for blood, it seems.
Trying to find a decent history audiobook to listen to on my commute, but the market is flooded with so much post-modernist claptrap that I’m getting frustrated.
My interest criteria is pretty broad – prehistory to age of exploration, any geographical region, just so long as it isn’t written by some marxist drivel-monger or a race grifter.
Anyone have any suggestions?
Fall of civilizations podcast or are you strictly looking for an audio book
I’m looking for audiobooks. Podcasts just don’t mesh with me (and I’m trying to spend an audible credit)
Anything by Will Durant. Written before political correctness. And some of his stuff is on audible
Thanks.
“Castles of Steel” the naval history of WWI.
Mary Beard or Adrian Goldsworthy both have titles on SPQR.
Tom Robbins (weird)
Edward Abbey (somewhat-anarchist)
Ken Kesey (weird)
Tom Wolfe (excellent writer who writes about interesting, weird people)
A friend recently recommended “Endure” by Cameron Haynes (bowhunter and ultra-marathoner). Endurance is my super power.
I have no idea if any of those tickle your fancy, but they tickle mine. YMMV.
Leon Uris – Trinity
About an Irish lad caught up in the original Original Orange VS. Green in Ireland
I haven’t heard of them, so I’d have to do research before making a judgement.
EEEEEEEWWWWWW!
Shirly (don’t call me Shirly) you’ve heard of Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe.
They don’t ring a bell, so if I have, it was too long ago.
So, one time I had a client who was the guy who wrote WAR OF THE ROSES (which was turned into the movie with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner). Now, when I was approached by someone, I had no idea who the guy was, but said, sure, I’ll meet him. We were going to be in New York for a conference I was speaking at. He took us to lunch at the Century Club. He mentioned Tom Wolfe. I did the stupid thing and gushed. In front of a prospective client. An author I had never heard of (I didn’t tell him that part).
One of life’s cringier moments.
Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” is a classic of SW literature. His “The Monkeywrench Gang” is am darkly humorous anarcho fiction listen.
Old SW bumper sticker: “Hayduke Lives!”
Liable to get your winders busted out in certain parts (Oregon, Northern Minnesoda), though!
But, yes, Hayduke is a hero of mine.
Seldom Seen as well.
Does “Monkeywrench” hold up, I read it so long ago I’ve forgotten most of it but I’m hesitant to reread it since so many of the other stuff I thought was great at the time turned out to be shit on the second go round. I’m looking at you Vonnegut,
I think so, but YMMV. The older I get, the crankier I get -why I might reach “The Hyperbole” levels of curmudgeonry…
:^)
I always said I wanted to be the Tom Wolfe of romance.
Also, A MAN IN FULL informs quite a bit of my writing, and is an excellent treatment of stoicism.
How can you have a prehistory history book?
It’s historical fiction, but I just finished listening to Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. I really enjoyed the book and the reader.
It’s about the building of a Cathedral Church at a Priory in England in the 12th century, with all the politics and intrigue between the church, king, earls, etc.
You’ll get your credit’s worth too, because it’s about 40 hours long.
Gibbons.
https://www.audible.com/pd/1-in-Customer-Service-Audiobook/B07YL79YNK?ref=a_author_La_c19_lProduct_1_15&pf_rd_p=1ae0e65e-ad09-4aa7-aa73-772cefb1b5e1&pf_rd_r=0K7QS69Y047818SJB5RF
This Supermoon is very disappointing.
Imagine how it must feel about you.
Most Likely it’s jealous of my 16, BTW, nice job defending the patriarchy today.
You two are stranger than Felix & Oscar.
I LOLd.
But the lightning bugs were lovely over here near Dayton!
Zzzt! Zzzt!
Nooooooo!!! Not toward the bug zapper!!! Oh, the
humanity…insecticity! ?Wait, they’re not actually powered by lightning?
Cold fusion.
(And I’d intended that as the lightning bugs doing the zapping, rather than being zapped. Sorry to distress you)
Oh. ::whimpers:: OK. ::sniffles:: Thanks! ::dabs at tears and blows nose::
Tucker is not really conveying the truth here.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/06/new-biden-regulations-putting-american-travelers-risk-forcing-thousands-flights-canceled-video/
No order that I have seen has been given…yet. It is still in the works of course to single out the non-vaccinated FAA employees, but it’s county-by-county as of the past few months. Even then, if a county is deemed “high community spread” all employees regardless of vaccination status mist wear masks.
A couple of weeks ago I had a flight canceled outright and another delayed to the point of uselessness (2 minutes between connections and I was traveling with someone in a wheelchair). We were supposed to get home on a Thursday and instead didn’t make it home until 10:45 Sunday night.
Test
So the internal server error is partly because you people are posting too fast and furious.
It is also partly because we’ve got over 1 million comments, and a good lot of that needs to be archived, which I will work on.
I think we should really consider a special, easily accessible archive of all my Firsts.
Why suuuuuuuure, since we’re not the ones paying the bill. *snortle*
Ok
It’s the final FIRST DOWN
The final FIRST DOWN, OH
$40 = 1/4 tank in my mom’s SUV. ??
I was trying to do a $20 joke…but it’s too early and it all sounded kinda mean. ?
The Only Winning Move Is Not To Play
New MB and PSU are set to arrive Friday. I was expecting to survive until then on my laptop, but the Chrome build was old and no longer supported by many sites. So I wanted to install Brave, but it wouldn’t install. I was all, ‘Fine, I’ve got a Windows 7 build I’m not using I can install on there.’ New install of Windows 7 didn’t have drivers for the ethernet or wifi, so now it wouldn’t even connect to the internet. I called me sister to ask if she could download the drivers for me. She said she had a laptop she didn’t use because it was too slow and I could have that. After deleting files and stopping bloatware from running it works fine for my purposes. Plus now I can use those fancy filters on Zoom!
Two years on and the Forest Service ranger stations are still closed to the public. Fire those worthless parasites, particularly if they won’t do their jobs.
But…but…COVID! Shut the fuck up and get the shots!
Check baby check baby check baby check baby check baby check baby check 1 2.
Hey, it worked!
https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2022/06/14/suspects-tried-steal-womens-purses-king-of-prussia-mall/
I haven’t been there since the early 2000s.
How would the actual Friedrich der Große have treated these fellows? Not well I’d imagine.
I was there last a year or two before the Covid Insanity started.
It’s bigger than it was when I was a kid. The mall owners connected the Court and the Plaza into one building. The new connector has a lot of high end shops.
https://youtu.be/A8Z6ghVijKo
?
A weird one.
Daily Quordle 142
5️⃣6️⃣
3️⃣4️⃣
quordle.com
“Another US Food Processing Plant Erupts In Flames”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/another-food-plant-erupts-flames
OK, what the hell is going on here?
It’s Ragnar Danneskjold and the Galtists.
It’s always the wreckers
Gonna be a hot summer.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg0tFRea0wA
They are making room for all the bugs4food plants that will be springing up. They sure do hate turkeys and chickens. Pure evil is afoot and will soon be running amuck.
Fat fingered one move in waffle game and ended up with 3 stars instead of 5. Sucks.
Mornin’, reprobates.
Good morning, ‘patzie, l0, Lack, TARDy, Stinky, Tulip, & Sean!
It’s the boss’s WFH day, and he’s already had me proofread most of his monthly report to the Board (except for the yet-to-be-finished ‘graph about whatever the Fed ends up doing this week.) So…maybe a quiet day at the office for me?
Morning GT and GP.
Yo!
“quiet day at the office”
I could use one of those. Half my team is at a convention in Las Vegas this week, so I am a tad busy.
Hope you get one. Today looks to be hectic. The calmest part will be training one of my direct reports on how DNS works and what sort of request he’s going to need to put in for a cutover. I figure he’ll get it once it’s explained, but no one’s ever explained it to him.
The worst part is going to be interviewing the system integrator leads. I’m going to make a fool of myself, because I’m totally unprepared and every time I ask for guidance on the degree of specificity expected, I get a repeat of the general mission statement for the interviews rather than a direct answer. 🙁
Mornin’, UCS. Thank $deity I’m not doing interviews these days, I do not envy you.
If it were a regular job interview, I’d be fine, I’ve done a crapload of those as the interviewer. This is an interview of the vendor’s key people they propose to have working on the project with us, so it’s both similar and different and people won’t elaborate.
That means they don’t know.
That’s exactly what I was going to say. Plus, if HR/legal perfect covering your ass response…
We’re a technical team. This is all conversation with fellow technical people about interviewing technical people.
*waves*
Howdy!
Quiet days at the office are good.
“Good morning, ma’am. And isn’t it a lovely morning”Good morning you wonderful people.Daily Quordle 142
7️⃣8️⃣
3️⃣6️⃣
quordle.com
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
?⬜⬜⬜⬜ ?⬜⬜⬜⬜
?⬜?⬜⬜ ?⬜?⬜⬜
?⬜?⬜⬜ ?⬜??⬜
???⬜⬜ ?⬜?⬜⬜
????? ????⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ?????
??⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜??⬜ ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
????? ?⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ?⬜?⬜⬜
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ?⬜?⬜?
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ?????
3️⃣8️⃣
6️⃣5️⃣
Mornin’, senor. I know you are on your way to a better place soon, but the beach must be lovely this morning.
That was a weird one.
Daily Quordle 142
5️⃣4️⃣
7️⃣6️⃣
quordle.com
??⬜⬜⬜ ?⬜⬜⬜⬜
?⬜⬜?⬜ ?⬜⬜?⬜
?⬜⬜⬜⬜ ?⬜⬜⬜?
????⬜ ?????
????? ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
?⬜??⬜ ??⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ⬜⬜⬜?⬜
?⬜??⬜ ?⬜⬜⬜⬜
?⬜⬜⬜⬜ ?⬜?⬜⬜
?⬜⬜⬜⬜ ?⬜?⬜?
?⬜⬜⬜⬜ ?????
????? ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛
Daily Quordle 142
3️⃣5️⃣
9️⃣6️⃣
Meh.
Daily Quordle 142
6️⃣7️⃣
4️⃣5️⃣
quordle.com
4 5
6 3
Daily Quordle 142
3️⃣5️⃣
6️⃣4️⃣
Daily Quordle 142
6️⃣4️⃣
7️⃣8️⃣
Daily Quordle 142
6️⃣7️⃣
3️⃣5️⃣
OK, that was weird. Just got the internal server errors everyone’s been talking about. Closed/opened browser and it’s back. We’ll see how long this lasts.
I’m not a big fan of the Pope, but I think he nailed this.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2022/06/14/italy-vatican-pope-francis-russia-war-ukraine-nato/5711655218266/
I may have given “some immediate feedback” to two other drivers this morning. They totally deserved it though.
A cheery salute is always welcome early in the morning. Did they have time to reply
I didn’t see. “Eyes on the road”, and all that.
Insert road rage song here.
Flashing your gat?
Check the trunk for any messages they may have sent after you.
Channeling STEVE SMITH? BY FEEDBACK MEAN…
Happy Waffle.
#waffle145 5/5
?????
?⭐?⭐?
??⭐??
?⭐?⭐?
?????
? streak: 24
? #waffleelite
wafflegame.net
Good morning to the Wide World of the Glibitarians!
The thrill of victory! ??
Good morning, 4(20)!
The agony of Da Feet?
Not as long as I don’t try to wear spike heels and end up twisting my ankle.
Mornin’ all.
I slept in a little this morning. No gym today as I have a morning appointment to have the windshield replaced on my Mustang. Barely 5,000 miles on it and a rock kicked up by a truck in Connecticut cracks the windshield.
So I was the one who had the quadruple trump. I was genuinely trying to get the correct words, although I can’t remember if I had any guesses where I accidentally used letters in places I already knew they couldn’t go. The main problem I ran into was I had 3 or 4 letters in one of the words, but there were a lot of possibilities for the remaining letters and I kept focusing on that one word rather than using guesses for the other words that would narrow it down. I’m guessing that legitimate quadruple chumping is less a result of bad seed words and more a case of bad strategy that only eliminates one or two letters per guess.
When I play Don’t Wordle, the seed words I use are KUDZU/ZYLYL/MAMMA.