Nerdle Solver

Nerdle's (https://nerdlegame.com) is like Wordle (https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/), except that the "word" you're entering is an eight- (or six-) character arithmetic expression.

Interactive use

If you're using it interactively--that is, without specifying the --answer option, input the results you get as an eight-(resp. six-)character string, where . means it's not in the word, ? means it's in the word but in the wrong place, and ! means it's in the right place. In the Nerdle UI, ! is green, and ? is purple.

So: if you are being a horrible person and using this to cheat at Nerdle, what you do is put your initial guess into both this program and Nerdle. Then you take Nerdle's answer, transcribe it into a result this program will accept (that is, character string of the right length consisting of only !, ?, and .), put that into the program, and then type the next suggestion it gives you into Nerdle.

Non-interactive

If you know the answer and want to see if this program will solve it faster than you did, try --answer and see how many guesses it takes.

Options

You can set the initial guess with --initial-guess.

If you set --top you will get more or fewer displayed best guesses than the default of 5.

You can let it run for more guesses with --guesses (the default is 6, per Wordle) and you can play with different expression lengths with --length (the default is 8, and Nerdle's "easy mode" is 6).

--debug will emit copious output about what the solver is doing as it does it.

Generating equation files

Before first use, you may want to run generate-data, which will put files in the static directory below wherever the nerdle_solver.py file exists.

If you don't do that, or if that isn't writeable, the solver will take a long time to start up, because it is generating the list of all valid-by-Nerdle-rules eight- (resp. six-) letter equations.

These files are actually fairly small: there just aren't that many equations that satisfy all the Nerdle rules.

adam@m1-wired:~/git/nerdle-solver$ ls -l src/nerdle_solver/static
total 2000
-rw-r--r--  1 adam  staff     6291 Feb  7 22:48 equations-6.json
-rw-r--r--  1 adam  staff  1014184 Feb  7 22:48 equations-8.json

Developing

If you want to play around with this yourself, make init will set up the pre-commit hooks for you. The solver itself has no external requirements: everything in it is in the Python 3.8 standard library; however, the test suite and pre-commit hooks have some external packages they require.