[As with the previous post, this thread was originally posted on Twitter, but since I’ve stopped using that platform, I’m retroactively publishing it here.]

A short thread on *ordle games and parallel computation. /1

Going from Wordle…

/2

… to Dordle …

/3

… to Quordle …

/4

… is a nice analogy for SIMD (single instruction multiple data) parallel programming. /5

Vector processing is the best known form of SIMD, where your data changes, but all operations are done in parallel. And that’s effectively what the higher n variants of Wordle look like. /6

Each “operation” in this SIMD analogy is a guess and, because you use fewer guesses per word, you can see the benefit of parallelization, but only because there are more words to reveal. /7

Just looking at Wordle, Dordle, and Quordle, they each allow n+5 guesses for an n word puzzle. However, as n goes up, I think you could reduce the constant factor; with an n>100 or so, I suspect n+2 or n+3 guesses would be sufficient for all games. /8

That is, make two initial guesses (e.g., RAISE and COUNT as I do). At that point, the process of elimination should enable correctly identifying a few of the unknown words. Filling in the letters and positions for those words, will give enough information for a few more words… /9

And so on until you’ve guessed everything. /10 (fin)