Introduction
Over three years ago, in this post here, I described how I came to enjoy the Wordle, which is a daily puzzle you can play on the New York Times website or on their app. Though I normally consider games a waste of time, this one is fun and quick. Best of all, since it’s the same puzzle for everyone each day, I can compete with my daughter Alexa who lives in SoCal, hundreds of miles away. It’s a fun way to keep in touch: we share each day’s result via text.
Well, over the years the fun has only increased. Not only are we better at the puzzle, but we decorate our game boards before sending them to each other, just for grins. I turn photos into virtual stickers, and Alexa creates original art. Meanwhile, we have the Wordle Bot analyze our game to see how it says we did, and whether or not we beat it. To the extent the Bot is inane or judges us unfairly, my daughter and I can bag on it together, united in our indignation.
And of course we end up with some pretty remarkable Wordle results at times. In this post I’ll share some highlights. If you don’t have a tradition of doing the Wordle with a friend or family member, I highly recommend you give it a try, and perhaps this post will inspire you.
[Art above by ChatGPT, based on James Cameron’s first feature film, “Piranha II – The Spawning.” No rights reserved.]
Some artistic highlights
It is no exaggeration to say my daughter and I spend significantly more time decorating our game boards than we do solving the Wordle. Even though we always do hard mode (i.e., any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses), the puzzle itself seldom takes us more than a few minutes. Here is some early Wordle art showcasing Alexa’s artistic talent and my resourcefulness:
The art, I think, gives us a chance to redeem ourselves when we get a lousy score. Who cares if we took five or even six moves, if the art is good?
Our chatter around the Wordle is fun, too. Of the above “GROSS” result I sent, Alexa wrote, “AI kinda roasted you with those photo picks LOL.” She’s referring to the fact that I use AI to find photos, from my collection, that pertain to the word. It’s hard to imagine how it comes to its conclusions. Above, going clockwise from the top left, we have one of my burritos which is far from gross (details here); a failed attempt to make candy which was Alexa’s fault, not mine (details here); some salad we had in Hawaii that was actually quite tasty; my friend Pete and me (who you callin’ gross?!); me after drinking GoLytely (okay, totally gross, fair enough); and me either yawning or sneezing (ibid).
Not all the art is good. Sometimes I can’t be bothered to try to come up with photo stickers for an abstract word like this one:
Art can seem beside the point when you’re recovering from the psychic exhaustion of almost crashing out. Perhaps this is why the same word failed to inspire Alexa to sketch anything:
But all is not lost; there’s almost always room for enjoyable chitchat about the day’s puzzle ... as you shall see.
AI for Wordle pictures?
Is AI fair game in decorating our pictures? I tried it once, but wasn’t too pleased with the effect:
I obviously don’t have any photos of lathes in my own archive, and figured photos of lathes pulled off the Internet wouldn’t be that interesting, hence my experiment. But there’s something creepy about what AI came up with so I was ready to call this a one-time thing even before seeing Alexa’s glorious drawing:
She wrote, “I have no idea what a lathe looks like so I just drew a complex doodad.” Well played!
Thinking alike
Often, Alexa and I will see that we made the same penultimate guess (before hitting upon the solution).
Or, we’ll even have the same second guess, as with this example, though we always start with different words:
Alexa: Bonus points if you know what gland that is.Dana: Pituitary. I mean, obviously.
Alexa: Good guess but no. That is in the brain. This is in the torso. It has alpha and beta units hence the little squiggles.
Dana: TBH, that looks like a carrot to me.
Alexa: It rather does. Looks phallic in some images but I try to avoid that in my drawing. J
Dana: I’m gonna say salutary gland. It’s the one that makes you want to salute.
Alexa: I’m learning something new every day!
Dana: Yeah, I guess that’s one of the benefits of being related to the D-Dawg!
Alexa: My drawing is of the pancreas. Which is only fractionally a gland. Only the purple spots are technically glands.
Dana: Oh, right. It being only fractionally a gland is what threw me off.
Alexa: It was a trick question.
Dana: Actually, I barely know that the hand bone is connected to the wrist bone. That’s about the scope of my understanding of the human body.
Alexa: That’s all you need TBH.
Dana: Exactly! I hope you like my non-glandular stickers. My photo library doesn’t include any glands, and I wasn’t about to comb the Internet for pictures of glands.
Alexa: Very understandable. Your pics are a lot more cheery!
Consolation
When I crash and burn on a Wordle (i.e., fail to solve it in six moves), it’s always a bummer, and then a small part of me hopes Alexa also crashed and burned so we can commiserate. (Of course, being a father, the bigger part of me wants her to succeed at everything.) Sometimes it just comes down to luck: with certain words there are so many possible answers, there’s no way (in hard mode) to eliminate all the wrong ones. We call this “Wordle roulette.” Here’s a word that stumped us both:
As you can see, we were both too disconsolate to do any art.
In at least one case I was able to console Alexa because she’d literally never heard of the word that was the solution:
Alexa: Gofer? What even is that?Dana: It’s a guy who works on some sort of team that frequently needs an errand to be run. Probably it comes from “Hey, tom, go for some coffee.” Even this [texting app] voice recognition software knows that Tom is a nobody whose name doesn’t need to be capitalized consistently. So he becomes a gopher. As you can see the voice recognition software doesn’t even seem to know the word “gofer” even with all this helpful context provided. By the way, I love that you guessed “boner.”
Alexa: Yeah, I knew it wouldn’t be boner but I was feeling feisty. Go big or go home.
Talk about roulette: look at how many different words it could have been:
Occasionally I’ve crashed and burned on the same day Alexa forgot to do the puzzle. This leaves me hanging, and in such situations I can sometimes gain consolation from seeing that the bot also lost, like with this one:
Alexa: I can’t believe I lost today. Rouletted to death. There were only twelve possible words after my first guess. Not a good round.Dana: OMG, I am so sorry. I kind of don’t want to send you mine now, though the stickers are quite good.
Alexa: Please do send!
Interesting results
Sometimes the results are just interesting in their own right, like when all the incorrect guesses are yellow, or they’re all green, or in one crazy case, all grey:
And then there are the strange coincidences, like when we both get all green on the same puzzle:
Alexa’s FUZZY puzzle is particularly strange because she had two guesses in a row where not a single letter was in the solution (i.e., all grey). What are the odds?
Regarding FUZZY:
Alexa: I like your fuzzys!
Dana: Thanks! It’s a lot more fun a word [to decorate] than “gland” or “dryer.”
Math in the Wordle
Sometimes math works its way into the decoration, like with this one:
Dana: Nooicin’ your art including the ever-useful quadratic formula.
Alexa: Haven’t used that equation in forever!
Dana: OMG, I use that equation constantly! Why, just the other day I was calculating … oh wait, I mean that I actually have no idea what it’s for and never have, though it’s still committed to memory.
Incidentally, my solution to this Wordle had to be faked. As sometimes happens to one or the other of us, Alexa accidentally sent me her completed puzzle prematurely, when I hadn’t done it yet. Obviously I could have then “solved” it in one or two or three moves, but that wouldn’t mean anything and would skew my averages across the years of doing the puzzle. I didn’t want that, but also didn’t want to end my streak, so I put in plausible guesses as though I didn’t know the answer already.
Getting back to math, check out this gaff:
I think that’s the first time I really goofed after solving the puzzle. Now, in case you somehow missed it, here is the corrected version:
A tough competitor
I tend to do the Wordle before Alexa, and whenever I solve it on the second move, I eagerly anticipate the BOO-YA! moment I’ll presumably get when we compare scores later in the day. But time and again, she matches my score of 2 and I’m denied! For example:
In one case, we both scored a 2 two days in a row! Considering we start with different words, what are the odds?
Bemused by the bot
The bot sometimes really confuses us with its analysis. And in fact, this can be downright annoying. For example:
How come when I guessed TUILE, the bot scored this as a 1 for skill, claiming it’s not even a possible solution, but when the bot guessed TUILE, it scored a 99 for skill? And if my guess is not a possible solution, how did it “eliminate one of the two remaining words”? To paraphrase the writer Muriel Spark, the silly bot is bats. And in this game (the solution being EXILE), the bot didn’t even beat me despite its self-professed superior skill.
I think I always bristle when I’m in the position of being evaluated by an intellect (in this case an artificial one) that makes mistakes I wouldn’t make. Consider Exhibit B:
Notice how it failed to point out the serious blunder that I did make—trying A as the first letter when I knew for a fact (based on the yellow in the first guess) that it couldn’t be—and yet it facilely points out that guessing “MACHO,” that being the answer to the puzzle, would have been a “better option.” You think?
The overall rating the bot assigns can be frustrating too. For example, check this out:
Given that I solved the puzzle in just 4 moves, vs. the NYT reader average of 5.6, I must have been either luckier or more skillful than average. But according to the bot, I was significantly less skillful, and only a tiny bit luckier. Huh?
If you yourself get frustrated by the bot’s judgments, check out this goof it made:
In its third move, it tried a word with an E in it, despite having learned in its first move that there’s no E. Weak, Wordle bot, weak!
And so, it’s very sweet when, as occasionally happens, both Alexa and I beat the bot. Here’s an example:
Wordle in 1?
I distinctly remember getting the Wordle in one move, and at the top the bot commented “GENIUS.” And I remember Alexa getting it in one move, once upon a time, as well. But despite sifting through many hundreds of snapshots while creating this post, I cannot seem to find either one of the Wordle-in-1s. But you can see them in our stats:
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