Wordle, Hard or Easy

Like what seems like 90% of the country, I am caught up in the Wordle craze, trying to guess an arbitrary five letter word in six (or fewer) tries.  Just in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, here’s how it works.  You enter your first guess into the first row of the Wordle board the press Enter.    Wordle responds by showing you which letters are actually in the word of the day, green meaning the letter is in the right place in the word and yellow meaning the letter is in the wrong place.  Letters that are not in the word are shaded gray.   Each guess must be a word in Wordle’s list of acceptable five letter words.  The best part is sharing how many guesses you needed (without giving away the answer) by posting your solution on social media showing only the color of your guesses without letters.  Wordle keeps track of how many guesses it takes in a chart shown on the right.   You can see that most often, it takes me 4 guesses but that on good days I can get 2 or 3 … or 5 or 6 on bad days.   In 63 games, I’ve always gotten the word in at most six guesses.   My average score (using the well-known formula) is

            Ave = (1×0+3×2+13×3+23×4+17×5+7×6)/66 = 264/66 = 4.19

One Hundred Percent

There is a scene in Zero Dark Thirty, the film about the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, in which a group of CIA agents is pondering whether Osama is  hiding in a certain house in Islamabad.   The CIA Director asks around the table for opinions about how certain each of the senior agents (all men) are that it is indeed Osama.   Each of them offers a cautious estimate of the likelihood on the order of 60%.  Maya, the agent who gathered all the intelligence, becomes increasingly agitated with each estimate.   Finally, the director turns to her and says, And what do you think?  Without hesitation, she says, One hundred percent.  Then, gauging their reaction, she says, OK.  Ninety-five percent.  I know certainty freaks you guys out.  But it’s him.   In my line of business, we are often trying to find a very weak signal (say, an object of interest to a radar) surrounded by other objects we don’t care about.   The likelihood that we detect the target is known as the probability of detection and our customers would love that to be 100%.   Many times we are lucky to give them 50%.

Playing the Percentages

I’ve been thinking a lot about how this diverse nation of ours can survive the polarization that seems to be gripping us. And while President Trump is clearly the polarizer-in-chief, we all seem to be taking part in some way or another. For every person posting Black Lives Matter on social media there is someone else posting, I support the police … share if you agree. But I digress, I don’t want to talk politics, I want to talk percentages, although certainly these numbers relate to politics. I just found these interesting when presented together.   I’ve included references and for the most part chosen sources with no political axe to grind: