Wordle-RL

by: Victor Ardulov

Introduction

This is a little sandbox for me to play with some ideas surrounding probabilistic decision-making. I thought wordle was a fascinating little game to try to train a machine learning algorithm to play. Largely this is a space to excersize my own RL skills and coding techniques, but I maybe this will be the next AlphaGo who know. WIRED article incoming.

Playing Wordle in Your Terminal

The first step that I took was to recreate the wordle game so now anyone can play it in their terminal to practice. This is mostly a byproduct to the fact that I needed to create an "environment" for RL agent to interact with.

Getting Started

"If you want to bake an apple pie, you must first invent the universe"

-Karl Sagan

-Victor Ardulov

But we won't start there... You will however need to make sure you have atleast Python3.8 installed and Git. My recommendation is to use a virtual environment or Anaconda python environment manager.

I'm going to assume anaconda is installed going forward since that is what I'm using. To setup the enviornment start with:

conda create -n wordle-rl python=3.8
conda activate wordle-rl

Then you're going to need to clone the repo and install the requirements:

git clone [email protected]:VArdulov/wordle-rl.git
pip install -r requirements

Assuming no errors, you should be able to now play Wordle in your terminal

python play_wordle.py

you can also use the --turns or -t flags to increase the number of turns you get to play

Here's an example of a game, inputs and outputs:

python play_wordle.py
You have 6 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: crane
⬛ ⬛ 🟩 ⬛ 🟩
c  r  a  n  e
You have 5 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: stage
🟨 ⬛ 🟩 ⬛ 🟩
s  t  a  g  e
You have 4 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: phase
🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩 🟩
p  h  a  s  e
Good job! it took you 3 turns to guess the correct word

if you want to practive with more attempts try out something like:

python play_wordle.py --turn 9
You have 9 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: hello
⬛ 🟨 ⬛ ⬛ 🟨
h  e  l  l  o
You have 8 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: world
⬛ 🟩 ⬛ ⬛ ⬛
w  o  r  l  d
You have 7 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: myold
⬛ 🟨 🟩 ⬛ ⬛
m  y  o  l  d
You have 6 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: frien
⬛ ⬛ ⬛ 🟩 ⬛
f  r  i  e  n
You have 5 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: icome
⬛ ⬛ 🟩 ⬛ 🟨
i  c  o  m  e
You have 4 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: to
Please enter your 5 letter guess: totak
⬛ 🟩 ⬛ ⬛ ⬛
t  o  t  a  k
You have 3 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: toyou
⬛ 🟩 🟨 🟨 ⬛
t  o  y  o  u
You have 2 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: again
⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛ ⬛
a  g  a  i  n
You have 1 guesses remaining
Please enter your 5 letter guess: pliss
⬛ ⬛ ⬛ 🟨 ⬛
p  l  i  s  s
The word was sooey, better luck next time...

For now that's it hope you have fun with it!