UPDATE: This post has been superceded.
I've been playing Wordle, the online game that's like a cross between Mastermind and guess-the-word. It occurred to me that the ideal "starting word" would have commonly-appearing letters. And it would be even better if those letters appeared in their most common positions. E.g., it would be good if my starting word contained the most common letter E, but EARLY might not be a great word because E is much more likely to appear at the end of words, not at the beginning. But I've got a list of words and can write a little program to find out which letters are most common at which positions in five-letter words et voila:
| position | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| s | a | a | e | s |
| a | o | r | a | e |
| t | e | n | i | a |
| b | i | e | o | y |
…so I eyeballed that data and chose my new starter word. (No, I didn't choose SAAES; I picked a real word out of that mess.)
