Wordle's Best Starting Word Has Been Calculated With Math

screenrant.com:

A YouTuber has solved the riddle of the best first word to use in Wordle using math. Wordle is a widely popular word game that has recently seen a meteoric rise in prominence. Wordle’s popularity has spawned copycats including Moxle, a Magic: The Gathering themed rendition of the game.

Wordle’s ability to let players casually compete with their friends without being a head-on contest by tracking players’ scores and letting them share easily on social media where they can compare with others is part of the game’s popularity. The best way to get an edge in this friendly competition is to have a reliable starting word that gives you as much information as possible about what the word you are trying to find might be. Players have all kinds of different approaches, but one Wordle player has taken it into their own hands to solve the puzzle once and for all.

Related: Today’s Wordle Answer: All Words For 2022 (Updated Daily)

A recent article by Polygon discussed a video by YouTuber Grant Sanderson, or 3Blue1Brown, in which he demonstrates the mathematically best starting word for Wordle. Sanderson found his interest piqued by the puzzle game and realized it was an excellent opportunity for an exemplification of certain aspects of information theory, in particular, entropy. To do this 3Blue1Brown built a program that would play the game for him, based on the most common letters in English words. That alone, however, does not fully answer the question as there is still the matter of letter order, which is handled differently.

There are just shy of 13,000 words that Wordle will permit players to guess, but only about 2,500 that will ever actually be correct answers. The larger list contains many words that are at best extremely