Live coded wordle scraper + solver, based off of Cory Doctorow's competitive compatibility concept. There have been many wordle solvers, but not many wordle interfaces. This project will allow us to enter wordle guesses on the command line. Instead of doing this ourselves, we will write a solver to do it. We can watch the computer load the website and play by itself. Fun!
This presentation is a bit of an experiment attempting to cover the following things
- how to select scraping tools (HTTP requests / browser automation)
- how to build a basic web scraper
- how to write a good enough solver
Web scrapers are not usually taught in school, but are intersting and powerful tools. This talk should make tools such as playwright and requests more approachable.
Additionally, there will be a focus on design, and structuring the program in an understandable way.
Almost. I have written a wordle solver before, but have not used this exact design. I will also be looking up playwright syntax in some boring but specific sections.
Less than 1 hour (maybe ~45 minutes?) to leave time for discussion. (Plot twist it took the full hour and we didn't quite finish)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l1Mabr0IGQ
python3 with the playwright package
python3 solve.py
We made a fully functional scraper to be able to play the game via the command line We made it partway through implementing some of the rules, and Matt + I fixed a bug right after the presentation ended.
Modified about 10 lines of code to add rules for "present" letters.
Also, handled an odd complication: if a letter is reused, it can be both marked as present / correct and absent at the same time. Really, we interpret the absent as "no more of that kind of letter, even though it is in the word", and this is quite a thorny problem. We "solved" this by marking certain absent letters as "overused" if the letter also shows up as present or correct. Further optimizations can be made (like counting number of letters required in a word), but this works.
Our pruning rules do not consider the number of letters that are in a word - a good solution must do this to recognize