Thw whole wide Wordle!

Wordle seems to be a pretty popular game these days. For those not familiar, the basic idea of the game is similar to Mastermind. Guess a word. Correct letters in the right place are highlighted in green. Letters in the wrong place are yellow. A really great feature is you can show your guesses without giving the result away. The game gives you copyable text looking something like this:

🟩⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Our instinct is that if you get a correct letter, then you should use that as the basis for your next guess. In my opinion this is terrible strategy. The goal should be to reduce possibilities as much as possible.

Example: first guess: 
DOVES
🟩⬜⬜🟨🟩
I could try other words that start with D, end with S and have an E somewhere. Deems, deeps, deers, diets, dress, dregs, debts, deals, duels, duets, deans, delis, desks, dents and others are all possibilities. But we only have 5 more goes. We can't try them all. Even if I get closer, I might miss.

However, if instead we were to pick BLUNT, what do we get?
🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨

Isn't  that worse?

Well, no. We already know it's a word that starts with D ends with S and contains B,T and E. We can guess DEBTS to win.

What if we went for something else though. GRAIL is a good one
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
Is that helpful? At first sight it's not. But it is.  We've eliminated diets, dress, dregs, deans, duels, delis. That gets the search space well down.

This was a particular problem a while ago. Several people had guesses that looked like this:

⬜⬜🟨⬜🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩

Why? Because the last letters were -IGHT. FIGHT, LIGHT, MIGHT, NIGHT, RIGHT, SIGHT, and TIGHT were all possibilities. TRIMS would not have been the right guess, but it would either have eliminated TIGHT, RIGHT, MIGHT and SIGHT, or revealed which one of these it is. If none of them work, FINAL for the 4th guess will certainly reveal the answer.