Six guesses suffice in Wordle's hard mode
Recently I posted some computer analysis of Wordle. That analysis applied to Wordle's normal (“easy”) mode. What about hard mode? Wordle's hard mode In normal play, Wordle allows any word in its dictionary to be used as a guess. But Wordle also allows you to select “hard mode”. In that mode, letters that have been revealed by the scores of earlier guesses must be used in later ones. For example, suppose I have already guessed TRACE: T R A CE (-+--/) Then that has revealed that the letters R, C, and E all appear, and that R is the second letter. In hard mode, every later guess must have all three letters and must have R in second place. So the guess PLIED from the earlier post would not be allowed. CREDO would be allowed, and so would CRATE, even though it couldn't be the solution (we know there is no A and we know that E is not the last letter). Computer analysis Hard mode is hard for computers as well as people, in that the methods I described before don't work as we