A Wordle strategy that wins 99 percent of the time

I read a story yesterday about researchers at Binghamton University who came up with a Wordle strategy that solves the puzzle about 99% of the time. It made me smile that someone studies this, so I read the whole thing.

The idea is simpler than I expected. Most of us guess words we think might be the answer. The researchers say that is the wrong goal. A guess doesn't have to be the answer. It just has to tell you a lot. So their method picks the word that cuts down the remaining possibilities the most, and it uses Shannon entropy to measure how much each guess would narrow things down.

The comparison they ran is the part that stuck with me. The information-based method solved 99% of puzzles. The usual approach, starting with a word full of common letters, solved 90%. That is a big gap in a game where you get six tries.

There is a catch. You can't do any of this in your head. You run a separate program next to the game, type in the green and yellow feedback after each guess, and it tells you what to try next. At that point the computer is doing most of the work, which isn't really why people play a word game in the morning.

I'm not going to run a script alongside my browser. But I liked reading about it, and it did change how I think about what an opening guess is for.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260911204910.htm