Bryce 0:00

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Oh, that's a nice one. That's a nice one.

Conor 0:05

That is that's wonderful. Welcome to ADSP the podcast, episode 63, recorded on January 15th, 2022. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we solve a wordle live.

Bryce 0:31

Okay, don't hate me. Sorry, I'm late.

Conor 0:35

Let me turn my mic around. Alright. I cut out of the last edit of episode 60, Bryce being 21 minutes late. But that doesn't matter, cause today he set a new record, ladies and gentlemen. It's 2022, new year, new Bryce. More late than ever. 54 minutes.

Bryce 0:56

Woo! I to be fair, this time like I gave you like a heads up that I was gonna be a little bit late. Admittedly, well, I mean, yes, last time. I don't know, last time you did too. Did you?

Conor 1:08

I don't know.

Bryce 1:08

I don't remember. I felt worse about being late this time if it makes you feel any better.

Conor 1:15

It's okay. You don't have to feel bad. I uh I was working on my slide deck for the pre-recording for my meetup on Monday.

Bryce 1:23

So what are you talking about?

Conor 1:25

Uh we're starting a new book, Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate. They cover what are the seven languages?

Bryce 1:31

What are the seven languages?

Conor 1:32

Yeah, good question.

Bryce 1:34

I probably no quiz time. Okay, but sorry, don't you?

Conor 1:38

Let's see if I can go through it.

Bryce 1:39

Hang on. Seven languages in seven weeks. Um I've got it right in front of me.

Conor 1:43

I do have the slide deck on my computer, but it is in the background now.

Bryce 1:46

And uh it is a pragmatic guide for learning languages, and hang on, I've got them. I've got them here, and I I I assume that they're in order. All right. Why don't you uh go why don't you go?

Conor 1:58

Ruby.

Bryce 1:59

Correct.

Conor 2:00

Io. Correct. We're gonna go out of order now. Um we're gonna go we're gonna go to the end. Haskell.

Bryce 2:07

Yeah, Haskell is the end.

Conor 2:09

Uh then closure.

Bryce 2:11

What position do you think closure is in?

Conor 2:13

If you didn't say that was the second one from the end, that means it's third from the end.

Bryce 2:18

It no, no, you got you got it. It was second from the end. It was second from the end.

Conor 2:21

Okay, I'm going backwards now. Uh so Ruby, Io, Haskell, Clojure, uh Scala's one of them, Prolog's another one. Yeah, that's six. And the seventh one, I definitely know it. I created all the logos for these. Or not created, I put them in a slide deck. What is the seventh one? We'll cut out the silence. Ruby IO Closure Haskell Scala Prolog. There's one prototype language, one logic programming language, four functional languages. So what are the functional languages? Clojure, Haskell, Scala. I'm missing a functional language. I don't know. What is it?

Bryce 3:11

Um, it's Erlang.

Conor 3:14

Ah, Erlang. Yeah, I should have known that because Prologue. Joe Arm wrote the foreword to the book, and he's he was consulted on both Erlang and Prologue. He's known for being the creator of Erlang, but for folks that are familiar with Erlang, uh, they'll know that Joe Armstrong first fell in love with Prologue and then basically wanted to create some kind of concurrent prologue system. So Erlang is heavily influenced by Prologue, which is well known by folks that know Erlang, but not well known by folks outside of the Erlang world.

Bryce 3:49

So uh so you know what we gotta do next?

Conor 3:52

Uh we've got actually oh oh wait, so wait.

Bryce 3:56

I I like how we we we both have probably different ideas of what we're gonna do next.

Conor 4:00

If we're I know what you're I know what you're gonna say, but that's not actually actually, you know what? We can come back to what I want to talk about if if that if we'll do what you want to do, and let me guess. Is it Wordle?

Bryce 4:12

It is Wordle.

Conor 4:13

I've been I've been holding off for a full 10 hours and 59 minutes, folks.

Bryce 4:17

Let me tell you, I do it on So uh avid listeners will remember uh uh that Connor is a Scrabble expert because it was like the only game, the only video game that his mother let him play as a kid. Um like in sorry uh computer games. Scrabble, yeah, the only computer game. Scrabble expert really undersells it. Um Connor is like a Scrabble savant. Um like apparently there's like competitive Scrabble, and um I'm just gonna go out there and say that Connor is like is ranked, I'm sure he's actually not, but like he could be if you want to.

Conor 4:52

I have actually, it's sad. I've been to Carcassonne Nationals. I'll just throw that out there. The Canadian Carcassonne Nationals. I've never been to Scrabble Nationals.

Bryce 4:59

What is Carcassonne National?

Conor 5:00

We'll we'll talk about that in another episode, but like for those that know about Carcassonne, they're gonna be like, oh, that's cool and like very nerdy. Um don't look it up. We got I I have a book club with my sister in two hours, so we gotta we've got a limited.

Bryce 5:14

I I I also I also have plans in three hours.

Conor 5:19

So we'll talk about board games, we'll do a board games episode. Oh yeah, that'll be awesome. We'll do a board games episode in the future.

Bryce 5:25

And and we have to we have to leave a little time for me to talk to you about my plans because I have a very function.

Conor 5:30

So really when it's not this isn't gonna be two hours of recording, it's gonna be like 45 minutes of recording, and then we're gonna turn off the mics and then chat about other stuff. Um but yes, I love Scrabble, and I I have to say I absolutely love this game. It's the best.

Bryce 5:44

And so so the the the the Scrabble skill that I that I think is gonna be like most transferable here is um is gonna be in first word selection. Because like that is key to being good at Wordle.

Conor 5:59

Yeah, I've I've played only eight times. I've never lost yet. Uh because I only discovered this eight eight days ago. Um and I've I've used the same word every single time.

Bryce 6:08

It's interesting. You use the same word. Yeah, and and I bet you you put a lot of thought into what this word is.

Conor 6:13

Uh a tiny bit. But I I actually think it's more second second word is more second word selection is more important. I think that's where that's where people go wrong.

Bryce 6:22

But I I feel like first word selection is um is most important because you you know it's like a shot in the dark, and you need to pick a word that um both has letters that have a high frequency of appearing in other words, and also that has letters that like appear in positions that they're commonly found in other words.

Conor 6:42

Um I think it's uh I mean well, like the reason I think that the second word selection is more important is because I already have my first word selected.

Bryce 6:52

We were I just realized we need to explain briefly what's for for our listeners. You go ahead. You go ahead. No, no, no, no, you gotta do it. You gotta do it.

Conor 7:01

Okay, Wordle is a combination of mastermind and words. It's a brilliantly designed game. Whenever someone comes up with something like this, I'm like, damn it, I could have easily like programmed this, but like the ingenious of the game is that it's so simple and it's just a twist on a couple different things. So for those of you that don't know, mastermind is a game where you have eight colors and there's a code maker and a code breaker. And the code maker chooses four pegs. They can either have four unique colors like red, uh, orange, yellow, green, or they can do red, red, yellow, yellow. They can do, or they can do all, you know, red, red, red, red. And you have like, I think I don't know what it is, ten guesses, and basically every time you put down uh a guess, so say my first guess is you know, blue, purple, yellow, green. I got yellow and green correct, but in the wrong positions. So there's white pigs to let you know when you've guessed correctly in the wrong place, and there's red pigs to let you know when you've guessed the right color in the right position. And so, based on that information over time, you can logically deduce, you know, what the code is, hopefully. Wordle is the same thing, but you're given six guesses in total. Mastermind, there's a lot more, and you're given five letters. And each time you guess, uh, it will let you know if you have a correct letter in the correct position or a correct letter in the wrong position. And and that's about it. So basically, you have six guesses. Typically, I don't think I with my first word I've ever had a in a complete miss, which is indicative of that my first words being good. But like the reason why I actually think that the first word's not that important is because I think that there's a ton of good first words. You you could debate whether mine is the best. I think it's a very good one. It's in the top 1%. But does that mean that there's not an actually statistically better one? I I don't know the answer to that question. I think the reason that the second word is more important is because a lot of the times when you get, you know, and so it's green means correct position, correct letter, uh, yellow means correct letter, wrong position. Usually you get one or two of those. I typically always try to include those in the next guess. So then the the hard part is coming up with a word where the four or three letters that are new letters are also high likelihood letters.

Bryce 9:17

Yeah.

Conor 9:18

And a lot of the times finding a word that, you know, uh fits that criteria isn't always trivial. And and yeah, so how are we gonna do this? Are we just gonna play silently?

Bryce 9:28

No, no, no. We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna share our screen and we're gonna we're gonna do this together.

Conor 9:34

Oh whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Together? But then that's gonna be cheat, can that's gonna be cheating. Or so I see. We're gonna play this together at the same time, so I can still count this. Yeah, I'm gonna do that. Although, although see this is the thing. Are you influencing my picks? Because I'm undefeated. I've never lost this game. I'm I'm eight for eight.

Bryce 9:54

Well, well, well, well, well, yes. But this is this is we're we're going to we're going to demonstrate pair programming and problem solving techniques.

Conor 10:05

I play mine on my phone, so I will play along on my phone.

Bryce 10:08

So Okay. All right. So what so what what it what is what is your first word?

Conor 10:12

My first word is tiers. T-E-A-R-S. Tiers.

Bryce 10:17

I feel like that's a good one. You've got the uh the S at the end, which is pretty common for you know for words. Um you've got two vowels. Yeah, I like that one. I like that one. All right, all right. So let's uh let's see what happens. Alright, we've got an A, not in the third place.

Conor 10:40

Okay, so and this is this is my strategy, is I always try to get uh in this case we have we have one vowel. So I always, if I've missed both E and the A, I always try and get another vowel, yeah. Two new vowels being the O and the I. But so like I think yesterday's word, and people can't go back and play this in the past, so it's okay to talk about it. I think yesterday's was tangy. So we got T in the right position yesterday and A in the wrong position, and then my second guess after that was Talon, because L N are two good ones to guess, and then O is I prefer I, but I couldn't I couldn't really think of a decent word that had an I that also had like an How many guesses did you get it in yesterday? Yesterday I got it in three.

Bryce 11:22

Um yeah, me me too. But I I my my from like my second to my third uh or like my third guess being tangy, um like I was not expecting to just get it right there. I don't even know why that came to me. Why tangy came to me. Alright, so what so what are you thinking we we should do here?

Conor 11:41

Uh ideally what I want is a word with a D, an N, an I.

Bryce 11:47

A D, an N and an I. Why why those letters?

Conor 11:50

Uh because um I mean if everyone anyone watches Wheel of Fortune in the bone in the final round, R-S-T-L-N-E. I actually don't like L as much, but R S T and N are definitely like very high. Like this is a game of statistics. So you D, N, like because D shows up at the end of words all the time, although now that we don't have an E, it's less likely. But I like an I is A, I, and E are definitely the three most common vowels. So whenever I can get an I in there, so it's all about trying to like optimize.

Bryce 12:19

So you sorry, say again which letters you want. You want D, I, N.

Conor 12:23

D, I, N. Reuse the A and put it in a different spot.

Bryce 12:27

Uh my my first thought was diner, but that's of course not good because it wastes two of our letters.

Conor 12:32

Um yeah, never ever guess a letter that's you already know is not there. They even gray it out on your keyboard in order to help you from guessing it again. That's uh that's a very um I mean in some cases you might have to if you can't think of a word.

Bryce 12:45

Um how about how about um how about no that doesn't fit.

Conor 12:49

Um so like think of a word that ends in N D.

Bryce 12:52

Yeah, that's a good way to think about it. Yeah.

Conor 12:56

Uh like so uh like an another guess actually we could do, and I've actually never done this. We could ignore the A for now and guess a word like uh found. Actually, I don't like found because F is low probability. So you're guessing I guess I don't like with that we I need an I. I need the I.

Bryce 13:13

You need the I.

Conor 13:14

Although like guessing uh that's a pretty good strategy at this point because we we have very little information.

Bryce 13:19

How about how about uh uh sorry you need an I, yeah.

Conor 13:21

Nadir. Oh that has an that has an R at the end though. Land Landy.

Bryce 13:28

Yeah, see that that's the problem. Like, like like I can think of plenty of words that end with N D, but they're all four letters, and then I want to stick an S on the end of them, and then that doesn't help us.

Conor 13:36

Oh, think of something A like basin, but without an S in the middle.

Bryce 13:41

Yeah, yeah, I see what you're saying.

Conor 13:43

Cigar also has an R in it.

Bryce 13:46

Yeah.

Conor 13:47

We're gonna have to cut some of this out. This is uh No, no, no, no, this is all staying in the We're just gonna have a wordle episode.

Bryce 13:54

Yeah.

Conor 13:55

Two software engineers way over engine overthink uh playing the game.

Bryce 14:00

I feel like I feel like we should maybe just do Nadier.

Conor 14:03

No, we're not we're definitely not guessing a letter. That is a subject. That was sub option. I will I will guess uh found or hound way before I'll guess because we we've only got 30 guesses in total. So that's three you're throwing away three percent every single time you reuse a letter that you know is not in it. There's a there's a very limited like the the utility of each guess.

Bryce 14:25

How about how about clown? I know it doesn't have your I.

Conor 14:28

No. W L O.

Bryce 14:31

W is the probability. Yeah, yeah. I'm now looking at my bookshelf for ideas.

Conor 14:38

P-L-A-I-D, plaid.

Bryce 14:41

Plaid? You like plaid?

Conor 14:42

Uh not really. I think there's a better guess out there where they have a uh P. Oh no, wait, A is in the same position. I don't like it.

Bryce 14:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't do that.

Conor 14:52

That was close, that was close. Way again is another guess. That has an O in it though, not an I.

Bryce 14:57

How about um disco, which has but it has an S, so that's no good. Maybe we should just do found.

Conor 15:06

What's irritating is right now I need I need to visualize this as like a scrabble rack with with blanks. Because like there's definitely a word like basin that is a is blank a blank I blank where one of those is an N for sure. I mean we've already thought of a few. Basin, Nadir, but all of those either have an R in it or an S in it. So this is why this is why I think the second guess is the hardest. Because it's like you have a strong set of requirements. I mean Wagon, technically we could guess Wagen.

Bryce 15:43

Wait, how wait, what?

Conor 15:44

W-A-G-O-N. I mean I don't like it because W is very low probability.

Bryce 15:49

Wait, Wagon? Did you just say Wagon?

Conor 15:51

Yeah. Wait, is that you don't think that's a word?

Bryce 15:57

No, I think that that's not how you pronounce that word.

Conor 15:59

Wagon?

Bryce 16:00

I think the way that you pronounced it, you said Wagon.

Conor 16:03

Wag Wagon? Wagon?

Bryce 16:04

You said Wagon. It is on tape that you said wagon.

Conor 16:09

Um Do I like Wagon better than found?

Bryce 16:14

I'm trying to think of other words like basin.

Conor 16:17

Um cabin? Oh! Cabin. I mean, doesn't have a D in it.

Bryce 16:24

Um yeah, I like cabin.

Conor 16:26

Okay, let's do it. We thought about this long enough.

Bryce 16:29

Alright. We've got a C.

Conor 16:31

Holy fudge.

Bryce 16:32

Yeah, so we're so now so we've now got, we put in cabin. Um the C is yellow, which means there is a C. The A is green, which means that we've can I know what it is. It's definitely in the second position. The B, there's B in the middle, um, uh, which is uh which we it was not a hit, and then there's I which is in position, and then N, which is uh uh yellow. Um so we have an N.

Conor 16:57

And so now Connor's convinced that he has the to recap, it's yellow, green, amiss, green, yellow. So we know the A and the I are in the right position, and the C and the N are in the wrong position. So we only need to reorganize the C and the N, which we already know there's only two places those can go. I'm almost positive I know what it is. I'll let you figure it out if you can figure it out. And see, I was gonna edit out this wordle thinking because I was like, we're wasting our time and this is embarrassing. However, clearly, clearly spending all that time on guess number two, we we oh, this is beautiful because it it it validates uh my whole theory of like uh the second guess is important and it's about statistics. If you want to hint about the what the word means.

Bryce 17:40

Nope, nope, nope, no hints, no hints. I have to look I have to look smart on this uh this this channel.

Conor 17:47

Let's calculate how many actual possibilities there are. The C can go in two places, the N can go in two places, and then that means that there's we've guessed uh nine distinct letters. And so if we assume that all nine all's 26 minus nine is 17, so 17 times two times two, I think. Or it's actually not two times two because when the C goes in one position.

Bryce 18:13

Is it is it is it panic?

Conor 18:15

That's my guess, yeah.

Bryce 18:17

Yeah, yeah. Alright, are we putting it in?

Conor 18:20

Yeah, let's do it. Are we are we gonna do Wordle every episode now?

Bryce 18:27

We might have to. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom. Oh, that's a nice one. That's a nice one.

Conor 18:35

That is that's wonderful.

Bryce 18:37

Yeah.

Conor 18:38

See, oh you that's you don't do it from the same device? That's what I mean, is that I always do it from my phone.

Bryce 18:42

Oh, I'll do I'll go do it from my phone later.

Conor 18:45

Because then it uh it keeps the stats.

Bryce 18:48

Oh wait, wait, if I do it from my phone, now I have to remember what I put in. What we put in.

Conor 18:54

That's great. I love it. What was the other word that started with a P that we were thinking about? I can't remember. Plaid. Plaid, oh yeah, plaid would have been fantastic as well. Um not as good as cabin.

Bryce 19:04

Tears, cabin.

Conor 19:06

But yeah, so while while Bryce is typing that stuff in, in Scrabble, I think one of the here, let me let me oh yeah, and actually what we'll do. I'll screen share. And and that's the thing, is we were thinking about it for a while, but I guarantee you that there's like uh 200 words that follow the blank A blank I. So here, let me quickly screen share. And what I was gonna say was that in Scrabble, one of the most statistically uh likely to make a bingo using all seven of your letters is like satire with a D, I think. So I'm at win everygame.com. This is like a word uh generator site. So if we go blank a blank I blank and then we put that as the prefix, so it has to show up in that order. We're gonna get. Actually, we should copy it into Excel.

Bryce 19:59

Yeah, cabins there.

Conor 20:02

It is 64 times two is 128 minus 1 is 127 words. Although if you omit the ones, it would actually be interesting if we omit the ones that don't have S's, Rs, and T's in them, how many are left? I'll I'll figure that out afterwards and attach it to the end of this episode because I have a little Scrabble program where I can So this is Connor from the Future. The answer to how many words have either an A or an I in the second or fourth location is 49. I'm obviously not going to read all those out, but that is based on the Scrabble dictionary. In the wordle dictionary, which only has a fraction of the Scrabble words, roughly 2500, there is actually only eight, and I'll read those out. So those were cabin, which is the one we ended up choosing, manic, valid, magic, cavil, panic, vapid, and final. I knew all of those words except for cavil, which I looked up and means to carp, which that means to find fault unreasonably. Back to Passconnor. Oh yeah, and then if we go Wait, wait, wait, go back.

Bryce 21:15

Is this is this is this the sheet?

Conor 21:17

Did you just Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is we're looking at the plan tab of my portfolio of words spreadsheet, and it's got uh 2021 and oh wait, we gotta update that. This is 2022, 2023. Um obviously, I mean everything has been updated. I've already read three books, watched 17 hours of lectures. We are 600-make me feel so so we're 664% ahead of our reading goals and 235% ahead of our uh lecture watching goals.

Bryce 21:47

I I uh there must be there must be errors in those formulas. There must be errors in those formulas.

Conor 21:52

Nope, nope. We can switch to the videos tab and actually watch the list of all look at all the lists in the video.

Bryce 21:58

My like goal for like this year is like to stop taking naps on the couch on my couch in this morning and to not kill these little air plants that uh that my skip level sent to our whole team. And uh I think I'm failing on both counts.

Conor 22:21

I can't I can't so I can't figure out uh this is definitely not the most likely seven letters, but like so uh retains, if you have the letters for that words, R E T A I N S, without a blank letter, you can spell nine different seven letter words, uh, most of which I don't know. Anestry, antsyer, nastier, retines, retains, retinas, retcinna, stainer, and steering. Anyways, enough about Scrabble and Wordle. I absolutely love this game. Nine for nine, undefeated.

Bryce 22:56

And I I I didn't realize, I thought that we're that like, is it true that the guy's name is Wordle?

Conor 23:04

I have no idea. All I've heard in the news is that he may said he's not gonna ever put ads on it and he's gonna keep it simple and free. And then I know one other um group of people or company tried to rip the game off, and then they ended up backpedaling and taking the game down, saying that they apologized. And um, I just I love when games like these come out, and this one's gotta be my favorite because it's such a simple idea.

Bryce 23:26

His last name is Wardle with an A. So so the name of the game is very clever because um like it just seems like a you know a cute name for like a word game, but it's also like you know, pretty close to his last name.

Conor 23:42

Yeah. What I think is is a miss opportunity is that there's no like you can only sh like the the sharing of the little emojis stuff is really, really cute, but like uh there's no sort of leaderboard friend thing. Like you can't sort of he should have amplified it a tiny bit more, because then we definitely would be on the same little leaderboard of whatever C or NVIDIA people, and and we'd get to we'd get to see each other's I I think it's it's it's I think no the fact that it's simple and elegant like and pure is one of the reasons why it's a successful thing. Yeah, and actually maybe maybe not appifying it is what people leads people to Twitter to tweet it because that's the only way you can kind of share it. So maybe it maybe it actually has become sort of more popular and viral because of that. That's a good point. Um all right, how long? We've been recording for 27 minutes already. So um we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna do our looking ahead at the year 2022 in a second episode.

Bryce 24:41

So this is now weren't we supposed to do that last weekend?

Conor 24:44

We we were, but then so we've already got like one or two episodes in the backlog. This is either episode uh sixty two or three, depending on how I edit things. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day.