Nicer Trees Spend Fewer Bytes: compressing 12947 Wordle words into 12155 bytes

What's the smallest javascript program you can write whose output is the Wordle wordlist? A lively "code golf" competition to answer that question is currently underway at the website http://golf.horse/. This video describes how one particular entry achieved an impressive amount of compression by using binary trees to divide the space of possible words.

Made in collaboration with ‪@jedgrabman‬ .
Submitted to Summer of Mathematical Exposition 2023: https://some.3b1b.co/
#SoME3

Interactive visualization: https://dwrensha.github.io/nicer-trees/
My code: https://github.com/dwrensha/nicer-trees
Jed's code: https://github.com/JedGrabman/WordleG...

Our current best solution.js: https://github.com/dwrensha/golf-hors...

00:00 - intro
01:04 - encoder/decoder
02:44 - Noiseless Coding Theorem
03:32 - a simpler two-letter version
04:32 - the binary entropy function is concave
05:35 - binary tree representation
06:39 - visualizing simple greedy search
07:39 - a more optimized tree
08:15 - some interesting clusters
09:02 - call to action