This is a sequel to my previous post, where I laid out a Information Theoretical approach to algorithmically solving Wordle puzzles.

The other day, I saw the word game Wordle going around on my Twitter feed. The game prompts you to guess a 5-letter word in a Mastermind-like style - every letter in your guess is reported as being correct, as present (i.e. that letter occurs somewhere in the answer, but is misplaced), or as absent.

There’s an apocryphal story from the development of a game called Battle Chess. A Product Manager was well-known to always have to make a comment or propose a change on anything, no matter how minor - so, an engineer intentionally added an incongruous companion duck in a piece’s animation. The PM could say “looks good - but lose the duck”, and feel that they’d had a meaningful impact, when in fact the end result after removing the “sacrificial duck” was exactly as the engineer had originally intended.

I fully intend to write a full blog-post as a follow-up to my previous post at some point, detailing some of the quirks of this setup and issues that I ran into - but I just got a timely reminder of the importance of checking backups, and wanted to pass it on to you.

In true navel-gazey meta style, the first post on this blog is a description of how I set up the blog.