Why Claude Shannon Would Have Been Great at Wordle — Quanta Magazine

My latest column for Quanta Magazine uses the viral word game Wordle to explore the basic ideas of information theory, the branch of mathematics developed by Claude Shannon that revolutionized fields as diverse as digital communication and genetics.

Wordle is a perfect place to discuss the way Shannon defined “information” to posses certain important mathematical properties, like additivity and and inverse relationship with predictability.

For example, how would you proceed if your Wordle guess came back like this?

What you guess next says a lot about you both as a Wordle player and as an information theorist. To learn more, and maybe even level up your Wordle game, read the full article here.