Ben Wendt's blog

Wordle is a popular word deduction game. The aim is to guess a word given six guesses. You can only guess valid English words that are in wordle’s dictionary. Each wrong guess will yield hints. A letter highlighted in yellow indicates it matches the target word somewhere. A letter marked in green indicates the correct letter in the correct position. I feel like a branching strategy (preferably choosing from common letters) is the best. But what word should you start with? And what is the worst word to start with?

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When I was a child, they had a plotter at my mom’s office. I don’t remember the model, but it was something like a HP 7550A. I was fascinated by it, and I’m sure I watched it go for many hours. From that, I’ve always loved plotter technology. I’ve always kind of wanted to make my own. Last year, the urge became too great and I tried out the branchiograph project. I didn’t get the best results for various reasons.

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Non-negative matrix factorization is a fast technique for generating embeddings from a dataset. More concretely, given a matrix you can decompose it into two matrices that are approximattely multiplicands of the matrix. I.e. given matrix M, it finds matrices A and B such that M ≈ AB.

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