The game of wordle consists of a hidden word that the user must guess. Solutions and guesses must be the same length. Each guess is scored using a series of colored blocks, one for each letter. For each position, if the letter in the solution matches the guess, a green block is displayed. If the letter in the guess is contained in the solution, but not in the current position a yellow block is displayed. If the letter in the guess is not contained in the solution, the block remains grey.
The first guess is effectivly random because the user is not given information about the game's state until the first guess is scored.
To efficiently solve the puzzle, each guess should match the results of each previous guess. If the number of possible guess words is fixed, then each guess and score reducess the number of valid guesses from the set of all guesses.
This analysis uses a simplified version of the wordle scoring mechanism to calculate the number of guess words that are valid after the opening guess for a given solution and guess word. This analysis is repeated for each guess for each solution. The scores are then summarized across all solution words for each guess word. The word with the lowest score can be considered the best opening word
To speed up the search for the best opening word, this analysis only considers candidate words that are also possible solitions and are composed of unique letters. To make the summary more robust the interquartile mean is used instead of the average.