Shared from gamerant.com
An ingenuitive Wordle player transforms a 3D printer and a Raspberry Pi board into an automated machine that can solve the game’s hardest puzzles.
Wordle has taken the world by storm; a simple word guessing game developed by software engineer Josh Wardle, Wordle debuted to mild fanfare in November 2021, but it has since ballooned so significantly in popularity that The New York Times saw fit to purchase it in February 2022. Yet, with thousands of viable words from which to choose, happening upon a solution with just a meager six guesses can be a struggle, so Reddit user u/iamflimflam opted to automate the game through the use of a 3D printer and a Raspberry Pi board.
In a forty-five-second clip posted to the 3D printing subreddit, u/iamflimflam demonstrates their creation slowly working out a Wordle solution, beginning with “raise” and ending on “tacit” in just four guesses. While the automated aspect is undoubtedly cool, given that the solution was a word so obscure that many believed Wordle to have developed a pretentious bent, the contraption is doubly impressive.
The realms of 3D printing and video gaming have intersected before. In 2021, an ambitious Redditor showcased an adorable 3D-printed sculpture of the Divine Beast Vah Ruta from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and, very recently, a dedicated Valve fan took things up a notch by 3D-printing a life-sized Portal gun. That said, few creations require the technological know-how displayed by u/iamflimflam, who offered an in-depth analysis of how their homemade Wordle solver works beneath their post.
It’s a pretty technical description, and the post outlines some of the major hurdles that had to be broached to get the machine in functioning order. First, it had to be able to detect the phone’s screen and the printer bed. Then, it had to be able to decipher the colored Wordle results so they could be incorporated into the next guess. Ultimately, the process seems to work remarkably well, though u/iamflimflam did mention that it has fallen over occasionally due to an issue with the camera’s white balance. Still, it’s much quicker than Googling lists of five-letter words as many stumped Wordle players have apparently been doing recently.
Responses to the post seem to be incredibly positive, though some replies were more interested in the time-honored tradition of getting unorthodox machines to play Doom. Plus, as one astute Redditor pointed out, if one automates work, then there’s more time to goof off. But if one automates goofing off there’s nothing left to do.
Wordle is available now.
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