YouTuber deduces "Crane" as Wordle's best starting word but with a caveat

Wordle is simple online game that involves guessing a five-letter word each day. Each player gets six attempts to guess what could be the word of the day. The online game has taken the internet by storm and has become quite the fad among social media users.

Wordle currently uses a dictionary of about 2,500 five-letter words, so guessing the right one is a rare occurrence despite millions of users playing it daily. However, YouTuber Grant Sanderson with channel 3Blue1Brown has released a video that hints the best starting word. TL;DR — it's "crane"

Sanderson performed a simulation of various words and their possible optimal follow ups and found that "crane" averaged the fastest of them all. According to the video posted by him, his method considers word frequency and a total of 13,000 words (more than what Wordle actually uses). His program guesses based on this data. The 30-minute long video also comes across as a good primer on information theory.

However, in order to improve your winning chances, you should be able to guess an appropriate second word as well. For instance, a word like "sloth" that does not contain any letters from "crane" might fit well. You can then narrow down other possibilities between these two words. 

What started off initially as a time pass during lockdown between developer Josh Wardle and his partner, Palak Shah, was released publicly in October and was soon lapped up by 90 people by November 1. That number grew to 300,000 in January. Current estimates say that the game is now is being played by more than two million people world over. Wardle recently sold the game to The New York Times for an undisclosed sum.

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