adversarial wordle

Every day, a new five-letter word is chosen, and players attempt to guess it within six tries.

After each guess, the letters are color-coded to indicate their accuracy: green means the letter is correct and in the right position, yellow means it is in the word but in the wrong position, and gray means it is not in the word at all.

If a guessed word contains multiple instances of the same letter—such as the "o"s in "robot"—those letters will be marked green or yellow only if the answer also contains them multiple times; otherwise, extra occurrences will be marked gray.

- Wordle, Wikipedia

Many people are familiar with Wordle, a Mastermind-esque word guessing game. I present to you a twist on this classic word game, Adversarial Wordle.

What is Adversarial Wordle, you ask? Good question.

You can think of Wordle as a game between two parties: the computer and the human player. Regular Wordle works like this:

• computer picks a secret word
• until player guesses the word, or runs out of guesses, repeat:
  • player makes a guess
  • computer gives player feedback on their guess (see above)

Adversarial Wordle instead works like this:

• computer picks a secret word
• until player guesses the word, or runs out of guesses, repeat:
  • player makes a guess
  • computer gives player feedback on their guess (see above)
  • computer picks a new secret word that is consistent with all previous feedback, and that is as hard as possible for the player to guess

I'll reveal more details on how Adversarial Wordle works, and how it was built, in an upcoming blog post. But for now - enjoy!