duotrigordle tools

This repo contains five Go programs which may be useful for players of Duotrigordle and similar word games.

• maximise-solvable suggests a first guess which maximises the expected number of solvable boards. A board is solvable if there is only one remaining possible solution. The first guess may or may not also be a valid solution.
• maximise-solvable-pair is as above, but suggests a pair of starting guesses.
• report-solvable reports solvable boards for a given sequence of one or more guesses.
• possible-words reports the remaining possible solutions and guesses after a sequence of guesses and responses.
• guess reports the game's response to a guess, given the solution.

Example usage (results based on 2024-01-14 word list):

• ./maximise-solvable reports PITON is the guess which maximises solvable boards (43).
• ./report-solvable PITON prints the 43 solvable boards. For example, if the game responds to PITON with Green Yellow Black Green Black, the solution must be PRIOR.
• ./possible-words -w PITON BGBGB reports that there are four possible solutions if the response to PITON is Black Green Black Green Black. They are RIGOR, VIGOR, VISOR, and WIDOW.
• ./guess PITON PRIOR reports Green Yellow Black Green Black.
• ./maximise-solvable-pair reports the pair CANOE SPRIT maximises solvable boards (667, >25% of the total). The algorithm is not at all optimised. It took ~35 minutes on a Ryzen 3 laptop.

Important caveat: number of solvable boards is only one metric of guess quality. More sophisticated approaches are possible. See, for example, There's A New Best Starter For Perfect Duotrigordle (24 May 2022, uses old word lists).

Build and run

Requires Go, and a terminal with ANSI colour support.

To build:

git clone https://github.com/mrankine/duotrigordle-tools.git
cd duotrigordle-tools
go build -o . ./...

To run:

./maximise-solvable

./maximise-solvable-pair

./report-solvable [-c|--show-codes] guess [guess...]

./possible-words [-w|--show-words] guess response [guess response ...]

./guess guess solution

Where:

• guess is a five-letter word. Must be present in guesses.txt.
• solution is a five-letter word. Must be present in solutions.txt.
• response is the game's response to a guess. Each position of the guess is either Green (correct), Yellow (present), or Black (not in this position). Examples of valid response formats:
  • GYGBB corresponds to Green, Yellow, Green, Black, Black
  • 21200 same as above
  • Y all positions were Yellow

Word lists

Word lists are located in wordlists/{identifier}/{guesses,solutions}.txt. The wordlists directory must be in the same directory as the executables.

The default word list is 2024-01-14, which is consistent with Duotrigordle's 14 January 2024 update.

Specify an alternative word list using the environment variable WORDLIST. Examples:

export WORDLIST=2022-03-03
./maximise-solvable

WORDLIST=my-custom-wordlist ./maximise-solvable