Thousands of Internet users who play Wordle, the New York Times’ online word puzzle, every day are cheating to get the right answer on the first try, a mathematician has found after a study.
“What should we call these people? “Hmmm, ‘cheaters’ comes to mind, so I’ll call them that,” mathematician James P. Dilger, professor emeritus at Stony Brook University in New York, reportedly wrote in his study, as the Ottawa Citizen reported on Thursday.
By his calculations, only a handful of the two million daily players who try to guess a five-letter word each day using color clues — yellow for an incorrect letter and green for a misplaced letter — are likely to land a correct answer on the first try.
However, instead of a success rate that should be estimated at 0.04%, which corresponds to around 860 happy people per day, it would be between 4,000 and 10,000 participants – i.e. 0.2 to 0.5% of players – which is the right one right away To find the answer, try a database of 2,315 common five-letter words, according to the English-language media.
You can find the combination of the day or get clues on many online sites.
However, the researcher, who based his research on three months of data from last summer’s Wordle game, found a slight decline in the number of first-time winners over time.
“Are the Wordle scammers bored or just on summer vacation?” he asked, according to the Ottawa Citizen.