Wordle 1001, March 16, 2024

I got Wordle 1,001 without mechanized help. I feel like the partial solutions would be worth double-checking with Computer Science.

Three guesses in, not a single green square:

My first regular expression:

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep -E '^[^craeghpsn][^craeghpsi][^craeghpsn][^craeghpsnt][^craeghpst]$'

That yields 120 potential solution words. I also forgot to require that an i, n and t must appear. Many of the 120 potential solutions don’t have one or all of those letters.

Second regular expression:

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep -E '^[^craeghpsn][^craeghpsi][^craeghpsn][^craeghpsnt][^craeghpst]$' |
grep i | grep n | grep t

Kind of sloppy, but the only mutual exclusion is between n and t in column 4. Regular expression #2 gives two possible solutions, toxin and until. Naturally, I chose until for my fourth guess.

Now I have enough yellows to know that n is in column 5, and t is in column 1 or column 2. Alternation of sub-expressions is easily possible:

grep '^.....$' /usr/share/dict/words |
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |
grep -E '^([^craeghpsnul]t[^craeghpsntul]|t[^craeghpsuinl][^craeghpsntul])in$'

This regular expression does yield only toxin as a possible solution.