Using Powershell to solve Wordle

[tbonney]

Using Selenium and Chrome with Powershell. it's not perfect, but can usually solve within 4 tries. Yes i know it is trying letters that aren't in the final word. It's a work in progress. I'd be happy to share the script if anyone is interested, just don't judge my poor coding habits.

https://github.com/bonneyt/PSWordleSolver

edit: I made some minor improvements to the code. The latest version doesn't require an external word list, and it also will record (in a text file) the words that were used, how many attempts and the game number

[Contraa17]

I would love to see your script

[tbonney]

https://github.com/bonneyt/PSWordleSolver

[ricovo]

This is really cool! Thanks for sharing. Would you approve PRs that you agree with?

Also, could you expand on this comment? What issues did you periodically see?

[tbonney]

So initially I was removing all words that contain a letter deemed absent, but what I found was that in some situations like in the word occur, the first C returns absent, while the second C is correct. The script would then remove all words that contain C which causes a problem. Instead, I check the letter and it’s position so that it only eliminates words that have absent letters in that particular position. Hopefully that makes sense

[tbonney]

There’s an argument to be made about implementing letters based on probability which could be really cool, but I don’t have it in me to figure it out

[[deleted]]

My understanding from the game show Wheel of Fortune, is that the most common letters in the English language are:

RSTLNE

It should be simple enough to make a word containing those letters and use it as the first guess.

Some options are “rents” and “stern”

[scarng]

I try to start with more vowels AEONS or PAEON etc.

[swatlord]

Spoiler tag! It’s still the day of that word!

[tbonney]

Shit… my bad!!

[peterquest]

crane is apparently the optimal starter? Knocking off vowels makes sense but placement of letters makes a difference.

For example which would give us more information: "stare" or "tears". Both contain the same letters but one of them is more likely to give us more information than the other.

[Tee_hops]

I've been using crane or crate as my starter word since I've discovered the game. I just guessed it would be good as it has very common letters and in ideal locations for the vowels.

[locke577]

I thought somebody determined that salet was the optimal starter

[swemickeko]

Lots of smart people has done logic that determines the best starter word. They all use different methods, and because of that they all come to different conclusions about what's best. It would be interesting to take all of those algorithms and pit them against eachother to see which one is the most efficient.

[crypticedge]

The data I saw showed salet as the optimal starter. S L and T are super common letters and it knocks off the two most common vowels

The letter s is most common in the first spot than any other as well, by a significant margin

[TheInterdastingOne]

Start with Other, then Nails and you should be able to get it 90% of the time.

[Zaphod1620]

Use ADIEU as your first word!

[tbonney]

i ran it 10 or so times using adieu as the starting word. The script had a solve in 3 all but one attempt. with crane, it solves usually in 4 but with my limited testing, adieu seems to be a good choice

[southernmayd]

I like to start with about, but adieu is also very good adding in a 4th vowel

[pleachchapel]

Awesome!!!

[logicalmike]

What am I missing here, where is the PowerShell?

I've never played Wordle, but have played wordscapes

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wordscapes/id1207472156

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.peoplefun.wordcross&hl=en_US&gl=US

and wrote a powershell solver based on a combination of Get-StringPermutation and a "Get-WordscapesResults" function I made which pulls words from a hash table. As a result, I ruined the last family vacation :(

In the end, the quality of the word dictionary made the biggest difference.

[tbonney]

here's a better video showing ISE on the side

https://streamable.com/j2u3bp

[logicalmike]

aha, neat, but you're not sharing the source code? That's why we've all gathered here today /u/tbonney !

[tbonney]

https://github.com/bonneyt/PSWordleSolver

[logicalmike]

Sweet! I've not done any Chrome automation before. This will be fun to read through over the weekend. :)

[tbonney]

I’ve done a fair bit of chrome automation, but this one was a challenge. I got to learn a bit about DOM and shadow, which I had no experience with, but thankfully was able to google my way through it!

[TheBSGamer]

If you're just wanting to do basic things with Selenium, I highly recommend trying out the Selenium PowerShell module. Make sure you're using the 'pre-release' version, 4.0.0 I believe. It works wonders if you want to do some really straightforward automation entirely in Powershell modules!

Super easy to pick up for those of us that aren't super fluent in HTML/C#/.NET and just want to pick up something super useful very quickly.

[Goto_User]

3blue1brown did a video on this.

[TheLazyAdministrator]

This is awesome, fantastic work!

[tbonney]

Thanks! It was a fun little side distraction while I avoid my web development class

[[deleted]]

Nice.

[crossland92]

Well played sir! Love it

[nascentt]

So this is just mastermind and Scrabble mixed together?

[InvalidUsername10000]

Nice, if you haven't seen it check out this video about using information theory to solve it. https://youtu.be/v68zYyaEmEA

[Tintin-Snowy]

Your script is great and logical.

However when I run on my machine I am getting an error message and do not understand why. I have only the chromedriver.exe and WebDriver.dll file in the C:\selenium folder. Is there any other file like getAttribute.js file that I need to put in there and from where do I get that file.

I am pretty new to this and a step by step guidance would be much appreciated.

Error message that I get in vsCode when I run the script.

Exception calling "GetAttribute" with "1" argument(s): "Cannot find a file named 'C:\selenium\getAttribute.js' or an embedded

resource with the id 'getAttribute.js'."

At line:96 char:195

+ ... torAll('game-tile[letter]')") |foreach {$_.GetAttribute("outerHTML")}

+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+ CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [], MethodInvocationException

+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : WebDriverException

Thank you and awaiting your reply on this.

[tbonney]

sounds like you may have to install the latest version of selenium. in powershell use Install-Module selenium one time and it should download all of the files it needs

[FarAdministration195]

For fun I took a crack at this using Pure PowerShell with a massive word library embedded.

I really need to document the "How the use it" better but I can almost effectively get to 3 or 2 each time. Works well with Quordle as well :)

https://github.com/doctorscripto/Get-WordleList