Before the Chinese New Year, some small green, yellow, and gray squares began to appear on Facebook, blowing a whirlwind of Wordle guessing. A word composed of five letters, if you are not lucky, you have to guess five or six times; if you are lucky three times, the corners of your mouth can't help but rise. Playing around, many people develop a strategy. For example, the vowel e is the most common letter and should be guessed first, and there are people who write programs to find the best word groups. The well-known math channel threeblueonebrown recently released a video discussing Wordle. The video is 30 minutes long and has exceeded one million views in less than a day. Those who are interested must watch it. Today, we share the basic concepts mentioned in the video with some life-like metaphors for your
reference: First of all, a quick introduction to Wordle's rules: Guess a group of 5-letter words each time, if there is the same letter as the answer but in a different position, the letter will be represented by a yellow grid ; if the position is also correct, the letter will be represented by green ; If there is no such letter, it will be displayed in a gray grid According to the data, wedding photo retouching services Wordle's answer has 2315 groups of words. The player's goal is to use the color block clues of each guess to eliminate impossible options and find the answer. Every guess is a lottery Among the various genres of Wordle, some people tend to test more frequently appearing letters in the opening, and try to create "green" or "yellow"; some people like to go out of the way and put unpopular words. If they guess correctly,
they can quickly narrow the search range in one breath. There is a trade-off here: even if you guess the easy-to-appear letters, there may still be many solutions; although the unpopular letters are not easy to guess, the effect of guessing is excellent. It's like buying the lottery: one with a high chance of winning but a low payout, and one with a low chance of winning but a high payout. Which lotto do you want to buy? "Uncertain" expectations If you know anything about probability, you'll answer: Don't just look at the odds or the amount of the bonus, but add them together to calculate the expected value.