Wordle

If you spend any time on social media you'll have no doubt seen fairly enigmatic posts with a grid of yellow and green squares in various combinations. This is Wordle - a daily word guessing game that has taken the world by storm (or at least, that seems to be what I've been seeing!)

For the uninitiated it's a simple game that has a daily 5 letter word that you have up to six attempts to guess at. Each word you guess will light up letters that are correct - yellow if the letter is in the word but not in the right place, and green if the letter is in the right place. There's just one word per day, and everybody plays the same word. (This is part of the fun of Wordle - that you can share your results with others and compare how they did - without revealing the word itself.)

There's quite an element of luck involved (the choice of your first word), but also quite a lot of strategy, and involves a good deal of critical thinking; what letters have I eliminated? What combinations of letters are common? What word can I play next to give me the best chance of eliminating letters?

Wordle got me thinking that it's an opportunity for a great experiment on consciousness.

I remember reading Rupert Sheldrake's writings about Morphic Resonance, which made claims about supposed fields of consciousness. And about the 100th Monkey Effect, whereby monkeys on disparate islands in Japan somehow communicated the practice of dipping their sweet potatoes in salt water for (assumed) improved taste that was triggered by some threshold number of monkeys (the 100th) thereby communicating the practice to all monkeys. Could these theories be applied to games on the internet?

Back to Wordle - people seem to be getting better at it. Is the word of the day somehow being communicated subconsciously to everybody so that when you play it that day you get to the correct word in fewer steps? Do people who play later in the day get it faster? Or does practise and honing your strategy explain the effect? (I think that's probably the best explanation.) Or, maybe seeing others' social media posts and their combinations of yellow and green titles give subtle hints as to the likelihood of letter combinations?

My conclusion from thinking about this is that good experiments are hard to design and there will always be confounding factors that can subtly bias results. The internet has given us a good opportunity to test out theories of consciousness, but seemingly these have not revealed any amazing paranormal powers of the human mind. Back in the late 90s there was the Global Consciousness Project . The hypothesis was that global, highly emotional events would cause mass human consciousness to affect the output of random number generators. It would seem that the project has been a failure, although its supporters, unsurprisingly, think that it was a success

If this talk of Wordle has got you intrigued, you can join us addicts players in a web browser or on your phone.