About
The idea of this project came to mind around early September 2022. As many of you I discovered Wordle game. However for me it was quite late.
Basically I included Wordle into my morning routine.
The challenge
However as non-native speaker I often struggled to find a word for my next attempt. Pretty soon I discovered Word Hippo that helped to narrow down the possible words list.
Every time I was clueless I went to Word Hippo, typed in all letters I knew from my previous attempts, typed letters that should not be part of the word and checked the remaining list. It saved me in a number of games actually.
I was pretty happy with it, however the question I had was “can I do better?”
Can I do better?
Next idea was to try and automate some of these steps.
I created a simple console application that used words list from my Mac (located at /usr/share/dict/words). Basically I typed in Wordle’s response (equivalent of green, yellow and grey letters) into my application and it returned me a list of possible words.
During the next couple of days I came to a fully-functional bot that adviced which word to choose next. If you would like to know a bit more - check out how it works page.
But still it was a console application where I had to enter everything myself.
Same question appeared - “can I do better?”
First steps to automation
As software engineer I had experience creating automated tests that used browser and emulated user interaction.
That was my next step to enhance the bot.
This time it opened a browser with Wordle game, used browser’s API to type something, to check state of particular elements and all other stuff.
This way I got a bot that was autonomous - just run it and enjoy!
This resulted in this repository on Github. The code is there and you can use it as you want.
More automation
Once I have a bot solving Wordle in a browser - can I record the screen? It turns out that yes, it’s possible and quite easy to do.
But can I upload to Youtube? Also - yes, I can.
Can I generate the solution transcript based on what bot does? Yes, I can.
Can I add voiceover? Yes, I can.
These were the things I did in the next few weeks to enhance the bot.
What I got in the end?
In the end (or is it the end really?) I’ve got a bot that can solve Wordle with quite high win rate (by the way it’s quite close to mine).
Each night bot does the solve and publishes all artifacts to Youtube channel and to this site.
All the processes are fully automated and every morning I have a fresh video I can use to compare my and bot’s solutions.
What’s next?
Right now I see the project as almost complete. Few things I would like to imporve are around bot’s logics. Some of bot’s guesses are non-obvious and I somehow need to teach bot about common words.
All the rest seem to be working fine and I’m really happy with the results.
But how it technically works?
Probably you are still wondering how it works internally? If so - please check out technical details page. Hope you will get your answers there.
Supporting the project
I don’t plan to make money out of this project. It was made for fun.
In total the whole project costed me $15 for the domain name plus my time to develop it during the evenings when everyone around is sleeping. That’s why I don’t have expectations about monetizing it.
However if you would like to support me - just buy bot a coffee:
If you want to contact me directly - just drop me a mail