Blurdle

Blurdle is a variant on Wordle, which took the world by storm in early 2022. Blurdle differs from Wordle in one way: the answers can be either four or five letters long and there is no way for the player to initially know the length of the word they are searching for. Blurdle offers up to eight guesses instead of six since it is harder to win.

Another nifty feature that Blurdle includes is my autosolving algorithm, so you can watch Blurdle solve its own problems. The approach I took in developing an autosolver was primarily to sort the word corpus by letter frequency and select words with higher summed per-letter frequencies first. It has a few selection criteria that can bias that initial rule, such as not considering words with repeated letters until after some threshold of "green" letters have been discovered or not considering four-letter words until after some "Nth" number of guesses. I optimized those two thresholds by running the autosolver exhaustively against the corpus at all possible (reasonable) combinations of those two thresholds and selecting the pair of thresholds with the best performance in terms of minimized lost games (target words for which the algorithm failed to find a solution within the guess-limit) and minimized average number-of-guesses to solve.

Blurdle was developing in Python and adapted to a client-side browser application using Brython.

Here is performance histogram for the optimized pair of bias parameters (2 and 4) against the entire corpus of 3315 words (1000 four-letter words and 2315 five-letter words). Plus signs indicate failures to solve at the original six-guess threshold and Xs indicate failures to solve at the extended eight-guess threshold (extended since Blurdle is harder to solve than Wordle).

early_guess_green_threshold, early_guess_four_threshold: 2 4
 0|    0|
 1|    1|.
 2|   65|======
 3|  554|=======================================================
 4| 1017|======================================================================================================
 5|  720|========================================================================
 6|  468|===============================================
 7|  264|++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 8|  121|++++++++++++
 9|   58|XXXXXX
10|   28|XXX
11|   13|X
12|    4|.
13|    1|.
14|    0|
15|    0|
16|    1|.
Total: 3315, Lost6: 490, Lost8: 105