Observation No. 14
Wordle and the Search for an Answer
A friend and I were comparing Wordle strategies, which feels like exactly the sort of conversation Wordle might have been invented to create. I told her that, more often than not, I solve the puzzle because I’ve run out of options and there’s only one word left that could possibly fit. It doesn’t feel like solving so much as cornering the answer.
She said her problem is almost the opposite. Even when the answer is sitting right there, she said, she has trouble seeing it if she’s already convinced herself it’s something else. She gets attached to the words she’s already looking at and can’t quite look past them. That struck me because we were describing two completely different experiences of the same puzzle.
I’m not really trying to find the word. I’m trying to shrink the space until the word is unavoidable. She’s trying to recognize the word, but once recognition locks onto the wrong pattern, it becomes surprisingly difficult to let go.
It made me wonder how often we approach problems this way outside Wordle. Some people seem to solve by finding the answer. Others solve by eliminating every possibility until the answer is the last thing standing. Neither of these two approaches is inherently better. Recognition is wonderfully fast when it works. Elimination is painfully slow until, all at once, it isn’t.
There’s another strategy that fascinates me too. Some people will deliberately play a word they know can’t possibly be right because it reveals the most information. They’re willing to “waste” a turn in order to make the next turn obvious. That’s an interesting idea outside a word game. How often do we avoid asking the question that would tell us the most because it doesn’t feel productive? How often do we insist on making progress when what we really need is better information?
I’m not suggesting that Wordle is a personality test. Five letters over coffee probably doesn’t reveal your deepest character. But it might reveal something about the strategies we instinctively reach for when certainty is unavailable.
And now I’m curious: when you get stuck, do you go hunting for answers that sometimes hide in plain sight, or do you trim the “differential diagnosis” until the answer has nowhere left to hide?