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Art of Data ScienceThe Secret of Wordle
김강민 강남포스트 학생기자 | 승인 2022.02.24 20:50

In October of 2021, the online game "Wordle" was released to the public. The game's rules are simple: a player has six chances to guess a five-letter word, and each time the player guesses, the game tells them whether the letters they used in their guess are either not used in the answer word at all, used in a different position in the answer word, or used in the correct position in the answer word. For example, if the answer is Hello and a player guesses Horse, the game will color the letter "H" green, indicating that it appears in the same position as the answer word, the letters "E" and "O" yellow, indicating that they appear in the answer word but in a different position, and "L" gray, indicating that it does not appear in the answer word at all.

 
Despite its simplicity, Wordle became a huge hit in a short period; the game, which started with 90 players per day, currently has about two million users. The game appeals to a wide spectrum of people due to its perfect blend of luck and skill.
 
In contrast to popular belief, some data scientists say that Wordle is a fairly simple, well-defined game. In other words, they claim that there is a method that guarantees the player will guess the correct answer in less than six tries every time. Dinesh Ayyappan, a computer scientist who earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and currently teaches high school computer science, created a Java software that instructs participants on which word to guess in each attempt. The program emphasizes two concepts: finding the right answer and removing the most characters. The computer proposes words that can delete the most characters for the first two to three guesses, and words that could be the answer for the next two to three guesses.
 
In this game, the traditional roles of humans and computers are reversed; normally, the computer analyzes the available alternatives and proposes the best fit to the user, but in Wordle, it is the users who study the options and choose the best one. The game, which appeared to be a random word puzzle at first, turned out to be a well-defined form of data science.

 

 

 

 

김강민 강남포스트 학생기자  webmaster@ignnews.kr

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