Tom
Punihaole

Weaver is a cool web game for Lewis Carroll's Word Ladder. I decided to build a simple program that solves word ladders. There's probably a leetcode question for implementing this already.

My approach is pretty straightforward. The general idea is you take the starting word and get the list of words that differ by one letter (hamming distance 1) and greedily pick the one with the lowest hamming distance from the goal word. You keep doing this until you reach the goal word -- in other words, Dijkstra's algorithm.

We all know about Wordle by now. If not, check it out!

Sometimes the Wordle is too hard, so I built a tool that lets you input your current game state and it will suggest the next legal word you can play. The algorithm doesn't do anything particularly smart. It just finds the words that don't break the rules and picks one at random. Usually this helps me get my next guess on the board if I'm stuck.

You could take the guesses the program spits out, input them into wordle, and enter the feedback into the program to get the next guess until you win the game, but where's the fun in that?