NOTE: THIS LIST MAY BE INCOMPLETE! IF YOU NOTICE MISSING ENTRIES OR MISTAKES, PLEASE CONTACT ME AT BENJAMIN.PAASSEN@DFKI.DE ! NOTE: EXPERIMENTAL METADATA LISTED IN NEXT TAB

These last four columns refer to the 'time' function in linux. Please refer to the hyperfine mean time for a more accurate reference.

graph representation

represents words as character sets (bitwise)

filters anagrams

words indexed by contained characters

uses character frequency

pruning character sets that were already tried

recursive

parallelized

Knuth's Algorithm X

Approach/Tricks

lines of code (including comments)

Source Code URL

tweet/form of announcement

timestamp of announcement [CEST]

github version timestamp for evaluation [CEST]

hyperfine mean time [ms]

hyperfine std [ms]

hyperfine min [ms]

hyperfine max[ms]

Median execution time [ms]

Execution time trial 1 [s]

Execution time trial 2 [s]

Execution time trial 3 [s]

anagram filtering; building pairs of words, then merging pairs; used reported execution time by Matt

https://github.com/standupmaths/fiveletterworda

https://twitter.com/AProblemSquared/status/1548948689229594624

too long, not executed

Just for reference! I did not actually run this implementation. This is the number released by Matt Parker himself.

graph representation; pruning symmetric pairs; no anagram filtering!

https://gitlab.com/bpaassen/five_clique

https://twitter.com/bpaassen1/status/1549326759505559558

too long, not executed

representation of words via bitwise sets of letters; separate handling between loops 1/2 and 3/4/5

https://github.com/neilcoffey/FunStuff/tree/main/WordleFiveWordFinder

https://twitter.com/BitterCoffey/status/1553297093334388736

graph representation + more pruning (starting from bpaassen's solution)

https://github.com/phire/five_clique

https://twitter.com/phirenz/status/1555072727534694400

iterative implementation that goes over the alphabet once and keeps a list of candidates to which this character could be added (or the character could be skipped); binary representation of words and indexing tricks

https://github.com/Azuzl/parker-word-square

https://twitter.com/4z4i/status/1555138929640226817

representation of words via bitwise sets of letters; an index to quickly find words which contain a certain letter; start with words which contain infrequent letters and work to frequent letters

https://github.com/oisyn/parkerwords

https://twitter.com/oisyn/status/1555152956097437696

representation of words via bitwise sets of letters; recursion; dynamic programming

https://github.com/ilyanikolaevsky/five_words

https://twitter.com/IlyaNikolaevsky/status/1555262027752407041

Donald Knuth's Algorithm X for the set cover problem

https://github.com/gweijers/wordle_cover

https://github.com/kristinpaget/fivewords

https://twitter.com/KristinPaget/status/1555281153455624192

backtracking perspective; add characters, starting from the most infrequent one

https://github.com/ae6nr/25letters

Fork of graph solution, incorporating several further optimizations, in particular bitwise representation, character fequency, and indexing

https://github.com/Savlik/six_clique

https://twitter.com/Savlik5/status/1555340245247434752

graph representation; representation of words via bitwise sets of letters; parallelization

https://github.com/pyaggi/WordStats

no description, but appears to use graph representation, bit representation, and pruning

https://github.com/orlp/matt-parker-five-letter-clique

fork from phire with recursion

https://github.com/alexrecuenco/five_clique

https://twitter.com/recuenco_alex/status/1555391372596719616

representation of words via bitwise sets of letters; directed graph representation; shortest path index; prunning character sets that were already tried

https://github.com/encody/jotto-problem

https://twitter.com/sudo_build/status/1555564934515138560

graph representation; recursion; multithreading

https://github.com/He3lixxx/five-words-five-letters

representation of words via bitwise sets of letters; an index to quickly find words which contain a certain letter; start with words which contain infrequent letters and work to frequent letters

https://github.com/oisyn/parkerwords

https://twitter.com/oisyn/status/1555723685557944321

Donald Knuth's Algorithm X for the set cover problem

https://github.com/davidad/five-letters

https://twitter.com/davidad/status/1555770747473301506

directed graph representation; representation of words as bitwise character sets; parralelization of outer loop

https://github.com/Diggsey/five_words/tree/master

no description; appears to use graph representation and potentially some further tricks

https://github.com/palday/FiveLetterWorda.jl

no description; appears to be recursive and makes massive use of builtin python functions for speedup; very short solution

https://replit.com/@pochmann/5words538?v=1

https://twitter.com/StefanP08342519/status/1556203368917393410

no description; but appears to use parallelization and the graph representation

https://gist.github.com/NathanBaulch/cc26755dc89685fa209bf958e484c60d

description appears to be a copy of oisyn

https://github.com/miniBill/parkerrust

https://twitter.com/miniBill/status/1556279304182448132

represents words as character sets (bitwise); recursive solution;

https://maths.tcd.ie/~dwmalone/5word.c

https://twitter.com/dwmal1/status/1556747072170246145

refinement of prior solution with AVX2 and hardware stuff

https://github.com/oisyn/parkerwords/tree/sse

https://twitter.com/oisyn/status/1556423303480451073

parallelized version of the prior implementation

https://github.com/neilcoffey/FunStuff/tree/main/WordleFiveWordFinder

https://twitter.com/BitterCoffey/status/1557056684715130881

nicely visualized version with bitwise representation and graph structure; nice trick with a skip counter to keep track how many words do not need to be considered in the word list

https://gist.github.com/fredoverflow/e3e0b5be677fd44500071356faabcf27

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTsP8ss5gjk

flexible javascript version which can change the word size and word count

https://github.com/jojo2357/five-clique/tree/node.js

recursive python implementation which explicitly skips through one character

https://github.com/utkarshgupta137/fiveletterworda

incidentally, an almost copy of oisyn's solution, but developed in parallel; three variants are offered, here I evaluated only the fastest one, v25

https://github.com/stew675/standup5x5/

I arrived at my algorithm independent of everyone but it's shocking how similar the others appear to be. I think the biggest difference in my code is that I sort the incoming words into buckets based on lowest bit AND highest few bits. This way, when I loop to pick the next word, I can filter out huge chunks of the list at once.

https://github.com/GuiltyBystander/5words

parallelized update in Go of the previous submission; note: I used the version with words_alpha.txt to be fair

https://github.com/fredoverflow/wordle/blob/master/wordle.go

https://github.com/miniBill/parkerrust

https://twitter.com/miniBill/status/1562209509900275712

Stew Forster & Landon Kryger

stew675 & GuiltyBystander

Extension of the algorithm of GuiltyBystander with several further tricks that are beyond my skill to review; according to Stew's info, they went down to machine code level for further optimizations and had to factor in things like caching and SSD loading speeds.

https://github.com/stew675/standup5x5/

https://twitter.com/stew6752/status/1567221440721698819

Recursive bitwise solution where the alphabet with explicit character skipping

https://gist.github.com/royvanrijn/c3dbcc6a8c5f2eea93c453af2ecca266

https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/1582369954879635456

Functional programming implementation with bitwise representation

https://github.com/anka-213/five-five-letter-words-haskell

https://twitter.com/Anka213/status/1582492030889885696

Compact python implementation with quite a few creative uses of python notation and concepts

https://github.com/sh1boot/fivewords

Extremely compact recursive python implementation with only 11 lines

https://github.com/trichie/matts_wordle

Functional programming implementation with bitwise representation; partially inspired by anka-213

https://github.com/OsePedro/FiveFiveLetterWords

https://twitter.com/rawmoose/status/1584036702758150144

Python solution that uses concepts from taboo search and has separate functions for adding words to an existing set and tabooing words.

https://github.com/agunning/fiveletterclique

splits the dictionary into buckets by the characters they contain

https://github.com/Plexcalibur/5Words25Letters/

parallelized, recursive implementation with quite a bit of Rust software architecture (modules, objects, inheritance logic, etc.)

https://github.com/zaneduffield/five_clique/

Rust-Port of oisyns solution

https://github.com/yarcat/parkerwords-rs

Go-Port of oisyns solution

https://github.com/yarcat/parkerwords-go

Recursive implementation with letter frequency indexing and bitwise comparisons, similar to many others on this list

https://github.com/PrettyFlower/Wordle5x5CSharp

C version of the implementation

https://github.com/PrettyFlower/Wordle5x5C

zig version with some buffering and compiler optimizations (main_v4 used for evaluation)

https://github.com/AdenKoperczak/StandUpMaths5x5Words/tree/main