My favourite along those lines was solving wordle in 1 guess using the distribution of coloured squares on social media https://www.kaggle.com/code/benhamner/wordle-1-6
We started using "Solve 100 Wordles programmatically" as our technical interview, and people _love_ it. They get really into it and have fun. It's pretty easy to do inefficiently, and it's great to watch people build on it and try to improve their scores.
It has two benefits: 1/ everyone clearly understands the problem 2/ people see it as fun rather than a drag.
I think "Solve 100 Wordles programmatically" sounds like a lot of work, so that'd probably be a "No" from me unless it was last hurdle for a job I was enthusiastic about but unlike "Write a program to solve this class of graph problem" I at least wouldn't be worried that you're trying to get me to do work for free.
Actually Wordle solver as Code Review task sounds like maybe a more interesting live interview than the one we do today. "Here's this mediocre Wordle solver, what is your feedback in review?" has the advantage that they've probably seen a Wordle puzzle before but it's not an example problem they've seen in fifty textbooks.
Then we encourage people to do whatever they want next: improve their average score, build a frontend UI for it, solve on Hard Mode, etc.
In the past, we never did technical interview questions like this. We always asked people to bring their own project, and work the way they want to. However, with the addition of AI, we hit a wall: we want people to feel they can use AI in a way that mimics how they'd actually work day-to-day, BUT we also need a simple check to make sure they understood engineering basics.
wimpy
crowd
thank
fuels
It would be possible to vary word choice based on revealed matches and hits, but if your goal is simply to solve (rather than minimise attempts), the above list works quite well.
I only play on hard mode for this reason. My next guess must always be a possible answer based on my current information, and that varies the puzzle enough from day to day that I still find it enjoyable to play occasionally.
I also impose this additional constraint on myself, which the game doesn't enforce, that I can't reuse letters that have been marked gray. Sometimes you just can't think of the next word, or might be tempted to use a gray letter because that way you could get more information from other letters, but I avoid using them.
This seems wrong to me, getting a 98%+ solve rate for Wordle is pretty common.
I mean, you had to give yourself an artificial constraint because IIRC the next solution was actually built into the page anyway, not obfuscated in any way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/upshot/wordle-hard-mode.h...
You can even go further—there's a set of 5 words which uses 25 out of 26 possible letters, leaving you one more word to enter the right answer.
But here's the thing: while that means you'll almost always win, your # of guesses will always be high.
> but if your goal is simply to solve (rather than minimise attempts)
Pretty much nobody's goal is to simply solve. Once they've played it for a few days, everybody's goal is to minimize guesses. That's the flaw in having a long word list—you always do badly.
ano-ther•2d ago