Are there any Wordle puzzles that can’t be solved?
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Are there any Wordle puzzles that can’t be solved?
Well, no, obviously, there is always a solution. But sometimes you find a pattern like BL_ND. You try “blond”, nope. Try “bland”, nope. “Blind”? No?? Finally you get to the right answer, “blend”. But if you already used three guesses to get to “BL_ND”, you can’t try all of them, so you have to be lucky.
So I wondered, are there any “hard” sets of five letter words, of cardinality greater than six, that differ by only one letter in one position? No matter how skilled you are at Wordle, such sets would require an element of luck, even if you guess 4/5 letters on the first turn.
So I downloaded a list of valid Wordle words, designed a simple algorithm using a hash table where the keys are like BL_ND and the values are lists like (blond blind blend bland) and looked for sets of 7 or more.
And the answer is yes, there are 440 word sets like that.
Even if you guessed “Water” and got WA_ER in the first move, you might never get to “waxer” after trying wafer, wader, wager, waver, and waker.
The largest such set has 19 elements: (zills yills wills vills tills sills rills pills nills mills lills kills jills hills gills fills dills cills bills), which also illustrates that a lot of these sets have somewhat obscure words.