A programmer has reverse-engineered the game Wordle to predict the words ahead of time – and is already being used to devious ends.
Wordle is a game whereby users guess six times to try and determine a five-letter word. Each guess reveals information about the word’s letters and their order.
The two played the game for months before Mr Wardle eventually created the website for the game, he told The New York Times.
He first released it to the public in October, with 90 people playing on 1 November. By 2 Jan, 2022, the game had more than 300,000 players.
Software engineer Robert Reichel discovered that the word for each day is embedded in the page, with 2315 words to choose from in total.
“Wordle doesn’t make any web requests when verifying your answer - Everything is client-side”, Mr Reichel wrote.
“The word of the day doesn’t get embedded in page load - It’s derived from the wordlist somehow.”
Finding the functions in the source code, Mr Reichel was quickly able to calculate how Wordle was selecting new words.
Mr Reichel’s labour has already been used by an anonymous person to program a bot that automatically replies to Wordle users sharing their scores on social media with the next day’s word. “I was sent from the future to terminate wordle bragging”, its bio reads.
