WordleBot is an analytical tool used by the New York Times. Once you have finished playing Wordle, WordleBot will analyse your guesses and give you a score for how skilled and lucky you were. This is one of the most open tools used for analysing puzzles (https://wordleunlimited.dev). It gives real insight into why some of your guesses were better than others.
What is WordleBot?
WordleBot takes your completed Wordle game and provides you with:
A score based on how efficiently you reduced the solution set.
A score based on how lucky you were with your guesses. For example if you guess correctly with a lot of green tiles early on and you had a high probability guess, this would be considered lucky.
A breakdown of how many words you could have potentially chosen from after each guess.
A comparison of what WordleBot would have chosen.
WordleBot has access to the same dictionary of answers as the game, and uses statistical analysis to give you an insight.
Skill score and Luck score
Skill
If you have a high skill score, it means you were reducing your guesses efficiently. Even if the guess wasn't lucky, if you managed to eliminate 80% of your solution set with one word, you will get a high skill score. If however you only eliminated 10% of your solution set, and there were better guesses, you will get a lower skill score.
Luck
Luck is based on how lucky you were with your guesses. If you got a good amount of green tiles on your first guess, even if you didn't know you would, this would be considered lucky. Whereas if you had mostly grey tiles on every guess, despite making statistically good guesses, then you would have a low luck score.
Both high skill low luck and low skill high luck guesses will provide useful learning opportunities. However WordleBot makes it clear which one you had.
How does WordleBot analyse your guesses?
WordleBot works out how many valid answers there are left to choose from based on all the feedback you have received. It will then work out how many words you could guess next, and rank them based on how much information they would give you. Basically it will rank your guesses based on how many guesses you could eliminate.
It will then compare your guess to this list. If you guessed the most statistically optimal guess you will receive the highest skill score. If you guessed a word further down the list you will lose skill points.
WordleBot's strategy
WordleBot always guesses CRANE first. This is because it has a high amount of information. After guessing CRANE, it will then guess the next word algorithmically to reduce the number of guesses it would expect to have left.
People who regularly use WordleBot after finishing their daily Wordle often notice:
Their first guesses are often good.
Their second/third guesses often have a higher number of guesses left than the optimal guess.
This is where most of your skill as a human will improve.
How do I use WordleBot?
WordleBot can be used by people who subscribe to New York Times Games. Once you have finished your Wordle (https://wordleunlimited.dev) you will see a button/link saying WordleBot. If you are not subscribed you can still see a limited version.
Using WordleBot to learn
Instead of trying to achieve a perfect skill score, it is best to look at when WordleBot differs from your guesses. If WordleBot says there was a word you could have guessed which would have eliminated a lot more guesses, think about why you didn't guess it. As time goes on this will help you develop an intuition for guessing high entropy words, meaning you will play better overall without needing to refer to WordleBot.