Words plain

These days, I try to solve the Wordle in 4 or 5 tries. At six I get edgy. I used to solve it as fast as I could, but I got tired of starting out with “Miaou Yenta”, as entertaining as that was. So now, I choose a different set of words each time.

I’m on a class mailing list – what used to be called a Unix Newsgroup – with my college class. There are some serious puzzle-ists on the list. One day the discussion turned to Wordle.

This gang is driven to solve the puzzle in as few guesses as possible. The NY Times supports this viewpoint, with a special ‘analytics’ page for the game which offers to tell you whether you made the best guess possible. (I have never read this page).

Everyone traded the tactics they used .. the first words like “adieu” and “miaou” (both words work in the French puzzle “Le Mot”) with as many vowels as possible. One advanced tactician also noted that the most-common letters in five-letter words, A,E,S,O,R,I,L,T,N,U, and D, are a different subset than the most-common (in order) ETAOINSHDRLU of ALL words (one writer noted that this sequence once appeared as the user key buttons on a LinoType machine … a machine used to set type which was used at the college newspaper back in the day). I’m not crediting who it was, just in case he’s wrong.

Another Wordle-ician noted that the three-guess sequence “Earth Lions Muddy” got all the vowels, and after that guessing was easy.

Technically this meets the “Band name/stagewear” ‘enhancement rule’, although I do like ‘fuzzy’ better than ‘muddy’ for the lions

After seeing a bunch of really funny word groups, I made up my own “enhancement rule”. Let the first two guesses be the name of the rock band, the third guess is what they wear onstage, and any guesses after that are album titles.

I got this idea after my guesses “Poule Aciel” in Le Mot, the French Wordle game, and thought of the rock group Steely Dan. Chicken of Steel! Um, great name for a metal group. What would they wear, tines? Knife? Fetching!

Bands, album

Code

library(slickR)

    band_name_filenames <- list.files("WordClips/BandNames/", pattern=".png", full.names = TRUE)

slickR(band_name_filenames, height = 250, width='80%') +
  settings(dots = TRUE,
  infinite= TRUE,
  speed = 0,
  fade = TRUE,
  cssEase = 'linear')