Always thought Wordle and similar computer games were just variants of Mastermind, forms of which go back many decades, if not further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)
Always thought Wordle and similar computer games were just variants of Mastermind, forms of which go back many decades, if not further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)
The popularity of Wordle (nothing new under the sun) indicates that there may be something to the phrase, it's not the idea but the implementation.
It's probably more of a case of, "what's old is new again." While implementation undoubtedly has something to do with it, Wordle probably caught on this time around due to it's digital packaging, the popularity of things seems to go in cycles.
Also the combination of the unique timing of the launch (late 2021) and the mass psychological/social effect of hundreds of millions of people worldwide working on the same daily challange, since they only published one per day, during Covid when lots of people needed a pleasant distraction.
Yes? Wordle is Mastermind; the only variation is that most guesses are illegal.
(Technically there are also more colors. I submit that the number of colors is not considered part of the ruleset of Mastermind.)
Well, Mastermind has 6 colors and 4 positions; Wordle has 26 letters and 5 positions. So at first it seems a larger solution space.
In Mastermind all feasible candidates are equiprobable (assuming the cluegiver isn't biased), but in Wordle we can use external statistical information (how likely is 'Y' to be letter #2? any letter?). Since Wordle uses a dictionary of 2331 possible words + 10657 additional words that can be used as guesses (so 12966 words in total). Out of a theoretical total of 4K five-letter English words, or 26P5 = 65780 five-letter permutations of letters (most gibberish). As such, you can often still gain information from trying a candidate word which you know cannot be the solution word (e.g. one letter known to be wrong position or missing).
You’re supposed to play on hard mode where it prevents you from playing a word that cannot be the solution.