Computer whizz builds Wordle bot that solves game in four guesses

By Charlie Fenton and Tom Cann

A computer whizz has built the "world's best" Wordle bot - but the starting word is rude.

Alex Walker, 27, created a bot he has named "Wordle bot" from his bedroom, which can complete the popular word game Wordle within four guesses.

Wordle is a daily online game where players get six guesses to figure out a random five-letter word.

Alex also believes his software - which he built over two weeks in December 2025 - outperforms the renowned world-leading American technology university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Alex, from Ipswich, says his solves the game in 3.419 guesses on average, whereas MIT's solves it in 3.421 guesses.

He also said it takes around four hours to complete the game after running all the possible permutations of letters.

And according to Alex's bot, the perfect first word to use is tarse, which happens to be another word for male genitalia.

MIT's recommended word is Salet - a bowl-shaped medieval helmet popular in the 15th century.

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The tech whizz's software works by narrowing down all the possible words it could be out of around 13,000 possible guesses and 2,315 possible answers.

He says it looks at the feedback Wordle gives in relation to the green and yellow square letters and keeps simulating until it figures out the best possible word result.

Walker said: "It started with a debate at work where we were talking about what the best first guess was and then I found that MIT recommended Salet.

"I said that it was 'tares' before I made the bot, so I thought I wanted to win the argument, so I went home and made it.

"It took two weeks to complete but 90% of the programming was complete over three days during Christmas before completing it on New Year's Day (Jan 1).

"It uses chess engine software logic and basic probability to determine the best guess.

"It then gets averages and figures out what is most likely to be the next word.

"After running tests it gets the answer most consistently between two and four tries, which led to the average score.

"It may not get it straight away, but it helps narrow down the remaining answers as much as possible."

Alex, who is a data executive in Ipswich, did an example on Wordle, where he started with Tarse and then his bot narrowed down all possible options to recommend Blast as the next guess, which was correct.