‘Wordle’ confirms the optimal starting word

nme.com:

New York Times has confirmed the best opening word to use while playing Worlde.Since the game launched in October 2021, there’s been plenty of speculation about the optimal word to use when starting a game.

One mathematician created an automated bot to test over 12,000 words, while online urban legend suggests words like ‘Irate’ or ‘Salet’ are best because of their vowels.In creating their WordleBot, though, New York Times has found ‘Crane’ to be the best place to start while ‘Crate’, ‘Slate’, ‘Slant’ and ‘Trace’ are also very good guesses, as are ‘Lance’, ‘Carte’, ‘Least’ and ‘Trice’.However, ‘Crane’ has never been the actual answer to Wordle.Explaining their work, New York Times said: “WordleBot solves the 2,309 possible Wordles using the fewest number of guesses when it starts with ‘Crane’ in normal mode and ‘Dealt’ in hard mode”, a version of Wordle where “any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses. “jazzy is the best wordle starter pic.twitter.com/gkm91A4MFF— oren482 (@oren4821) April 8, 2022“This may surprise some readers, who have seen, in various places across the internet, people claim that words like ‘Irate’, ‘Salet’ or ‘Raise’ are the best openers.

The truth is that it depends exactly how you’re playing and whether you are a human or a computer,” the post continued.They go on to explain that different algorithms take different approaches to solve the problem with WordleBot restricted “to about 4,500 words that are more common among English speakers — it didn’t seem particularly helpful for a piece of software to recommend words like ‘Voema’, ‘Cusso’, ‘Skatt’ or ‘Zebub’.”Want to know why you played so well — or so bad — in today's wordle?