Imagine a crystal clear water pond teeming with a set number of Wordlefish. Wordlefish are a tropical fish having five vertical colorless stripes on their sides. Wordlefish school together according to their stripe colors. The fish school together as one group when the stripes are colorless because, of course, at that time each fish displays the same colorless stripes.
Each Wordlefish carries a unique invisible five letter Wordle gene that spells a word. One Wordlefish carries the gene spelling the day’s Wordle. But Wordlefish do not know what a word is or even what a day’s Wordle is. Wordlefish do not know even what a letter is. Wordlefish are illiterate.
Wordlefish laugh when one whispers to it, “Are you the day’s Wordle?”. A laughing Wordlefish laughs so hard that its eyes tear. Its tears instantly diffuse throughout the pond causing all the colorless stripes on every fish, including the one laughing fish, to change to a combination of grey, or yellow or green stripes. The stripe color meanings are similar to the way the Wordle puzzle works.
The resulting colored stripe patterns on a Wordlefish correspond to how the laughing fish is or is not the day’s Wordle compared to the fish reacting to the tears. The reaction is as if the reacting fish’s Wordle gene is the day’s Wordle. For example, if the laughing fish’s Wordle gene spells WARMS then a reacting fish having the Wordle gene SWARM would have all yellow stripes since each letter in WARMS, the laughing fish, is present in SWARM, but not at the same letter position in WARMS. It is as if SWARM is the day’s Wordle and WARMS is a guess. The tears are the Wordle guess.
The laughing fish’s stripes would be all green because it reacts to its own tears just like any other Wordlefish. WARMS exactly matches WARMS.
Recall that Wordlefish school together according to their stripe colors. After you cause one Wordlefish to laugh the now color striped Wordlefish school, or group as we say, according to their stripe patterns. The schooling groups keep as much distance from every other schooling group as best as they can. The crystal clear water allows us to notice each schooling group.
The number of schooling Wordlefish groups depends entirely on that one laughing fish’s Wordle gene. Each Wordlefish in the pond belongs to only one schooling group. Its brethren in the schooling group, if there are any in the same schooling group, all share the same stripe pattern.
The Wordlefish that carries the gene spelling the day’s Wordle is in the pond. Therefore, one of these schooling groups has to include the one fish carrying the day’s Wordle gene. The fish that laughed at “Are you the day’s Wordle” is the only fish in its all-stripes-green group. Fish having no Wordle genes in common with the laughing fish are in the all-stripes-grey schooling group. That all-stripes-grey group might contain the most number of fish. But there might not be an all-stripes-grey group. Or, the all-stripes-grey group might contain only one Wordlefish. The number of groups and the stripe pattern for each group depends entirely on which single Wordlefish you made laugh and on each Wordlefish in the pond exposed to the laugh tears.
The effect the laugh tears have on the Wordlefish stripe color is short-lived. The stripes revert to colorless after a while. All the Wordlefish return to one schooling group. We can now systematically ask each Wordlefish, “Are you the day’s Wordle?”. We pay attention to the number of schooling groups caused by the laugh tears from each fish.
Some laughing Wordlefish will result in many more schooling groups than other Wordlefish. This ability has nothing to do with which fish carries the gene spelling the day’s Wordle. The ability is merely a function of how the particular laughing fish’s Wordle gene relates to the Wordle gene in the pond's current Wordlefish population. The day’s Wordle has nothing to do with how many fish schooling groups there are.
Because the Wordlefish population is divided up by the number of schooling groups it follows that the average number of Wordlefish in each schooling group will be smaller when a laughing Wordlefish results in more schooling groups than another laughing Wordlefish that produces fewer school groups. This means the unknown fish carrying the gene spelling the day’s Wordle tends to be in a smaller school group when the laughing Wordlefish results in more schooling groups. Again, the day’s Wordle has nothing to do with this division process.
Now comes the most magical aspect. An outside entity must judge the groups caused by the laughing Wordlefish’s Wordle gene against the actual day’s Wordle gene the way Wordle judges a game guess. If we clap our hands together five times in a row the outside entity makes the Wordlefish school groups not containing the Wordlefish carrying the day’s Wordle gene fly away out of the pond. Yes, Wordlefish can fly.
Only the one school that contains the Wordlefish carrying the day’s Wordle gene remains in the pond. The number of remaining Wordlefish, one of which is carrying the day’s Wordle gene, is likely smaller when we clap our hands when there are the most number of schooling groups in the pond and when the number of Wordlefish in those schooling groups varies the least. We use this information to decide when to clap our hands.
The remaining Wordlefish's stripes revert after a while. Their stripes are now all colorless, so they remain schooling as one group. Now the fish population is smaller. We can again ask each fish the same question, “Are you the day’s Wordle”, to observe the resulting schooling groups. The number of resulting schooling groups has nothing to do with which remaining fish carries the gene spelling the day’s Wordle. It is not known by us or the fish. What is known is that the "right" fish is in this smaller pond population because we know the process ensures this, provided the "right" fish was present when we started. The school grouping is a function of how the particular laughing fish’s Wordle genes relate to the Wordle genes in this particular, now smaller, pond Wordlefish population.
We are not limited to asking only the remaining Wordlefish the hilarious question. Wordlefish can fly as we know. We can also ask one of those flying Wordlefish the question, provided that its laugh tears can fall into the pond. We will notice many times that laugh tears from Wordlefish not present in the pond cause many more schooling groups than laugh tears from any one of the remaining Wordlefish swimming in the pond. This is due to more gene diversity present in the larger population since, after all, the pond’s remaining Wordlefish are there because they share similarities.
The reason we ask Wordlefish, "Are you the day's Wordle?", is to get a Wordlefish to laugh. We are not trying to guess the day's Wordle. There will not be an all-stripes-green school group after asking a flying Wordlefish the question because that flying fish is not in the pond. Even though a flying Wordlefish is not in the pond, the resulting number of schooling groups from a flying fish might be a much better schooling situation than the schooling groups situation resulting from asking a remaining, swimming Wordlefish the question. Quite often this is true.
When the number of remaining Wordlefish becomes smaller we notice there could be the same number of school groups as there are remaining fish. That means each school group contains one fish. Now clapping your hands five times in a row causes all but the “right” fish to fly away regardless of which of the remaining fish carries the day’s Wordle gene.
The day’s Wordle is now selected without applying one iota of letter knowledge in words and without one iota of knowing what a word is or what that word’s use frequency might be. We needed only access to lots of Wordlefish, and we needed a Wordlefish population that contains the unknown fish that carries the day’s Wordle gene.
How many times we perform the hand clapping to select the right Wordlefish depends upon how skillfully we discriminate between resulting school group results and then how lucky those choices turned out. Skill is selecting the laughing fish to most likely generate many small school groups. Luck is whether the unknown right Wordlefish winds up in smaller school group sizes than expected. Expectation is figured by observing how many small school groups exist that the unknown "right" Wordlefish might be in.
This solving method described in allegory is precisely what the WordleBot shows when it analyses one’s submitted Wordle game. Every procedure step is actually a play to more likely reduce the remaining words. We falsely consider these steps as answer guesses based on letter clue knowledge in words etc. Therefore the WordleBot's "guesses" appear illogical to us that do not understand the allegory. Without understanding the Wordle groups parlor trick the bot's word choices appear to defy conventional wisdom. It follows that the bot's skill and luck reasoning are unfathomable.