Who Has The Best Wordle Starting Word: Bill Gates, Wordle Bot Or MIT?

Games Who Has The Best Wordle Starting Word: Bill Gates, Wordle Bot Or MIT? Erik Kain Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about video games, entertainment and culture. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories.

Got it! Sep 15, 2022, 08:00am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The debate over the best Wordle starting word is far from settled. getty Everybody has a different strategy when it comes to the popular word puzzle game Wordle. Some people pick the same word every single time.

Others—like me—try to come up with a new word almost every single day (with admittedly mixed results). Recently, Bill Gates wrote a blog post outlining his own favorite starting Wordle word (as well as the other puzzle games he plays like Quordle and Octordle , which are a tiny bit more challenging—and, of course, Nerdle ). Gates picks words with lots of vowels when he starts his guessing.

“I like to start with a word that contains lots of vowels,” he writes, “like AUDIO or OUNCE. ADIEU is a good one too. ” This isn’t what Wordle Bot recommends, though The New York Times AI has waffled lately on which starting word it prefers.

For a long time that word was crane . Then, not long ago, it started using slate. Now it’s back to crane.

Now, researches at MIT have scientifically proven the very best Wordle starting word of them all: salet— which is either an alternative spelling for a type of 15th century European helmet, or a small room where you receive guests. A German sallet with bevor c 1480 – 1490. Credit: Wikipedia MORE FOR YOU ‘Demon Slayer’ Season 2 Finally Has An Actual 2021 Release Date Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Season 2 Not A Sure Thing, Says Director ‘Genshin Impact’ Still Refuses To Increase Anniversary Rewards, Despite Fan Outcry The researches published a paper titled “An Exact and Interpretable Solution to Wordle” [ pdf ] which outlines the study.

“If you play SALET and you play intelligently you can assuredly win the game within five guesses,” researcher and MIT Ph. D. student Alex Paskov told CNBC .

“You don’t even need that last guess. ” Paskov believes that the New York Times simply didn’t have the resources and computational capabilities that the MIT team had when determining the best Wordle starting guess. “What the New York Times actually did to determine CRANE is they focused on a small subset of possibilities that they can solve on a basic computer,” he said.

“But at MIT, we have a lot of resources, we have very fast computers, very big supercomputers. So we weren’t too afraid to face this bigger, more difficult task of exhaustively enumerating every possibility. ” The algorithm that MIT used solved—on average—Wordle’s puzzles with just 3.

421 guesses, which they determined was better than audio or crane. And salet performed 1% better than Wordle Bot’s recent best word, slate, despite having the same letters. You can test the word out against your own guesses at this MIT-designed website.

For my part, I maintain that coming up with new starting words is more fun, more interesting and a more engaging challenge than simply picking the best word out there. I like thinking of new words each day, or using a word that speaks to whatever’s happening in the world or in my life at the time. You could pick queen to honor Queen Elizabeth II when she passes; or rings for the Amazon Rings Of Power show’s debut; or house for the HBO Game Of Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon.

The point is, it’s fun to come up with lots of different words and see what happens. I often start badly but I almost never need that 6th guess, either. So maybe Bill Gates, Wordle Bot and MIT are all wrong.

Maybe I’m the champ. Follow me on Twitter . Check out my website .

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