By: Timothy Chow
Nice post. There is quite a lot of related literature, which you can find by searching for “Mastermind.” For example, there is a 2016 J. ACM paper by Doerr et al., “Playing Mastermind with Many...
View ArticleBy: Valter Sorana
There seems to be a bug with the StdDev algorithm in Program 1: I entered COCOA as target word and ADIEU as start word; the program then chose the word AFFIX for five times in a row!
View ArticleBy: Brian Hayes
Thanks for the alert. It’s a bug I’d seen before and thought I’d fixed. Apparently I only AFFIXED it.
View ArticleBy: unekdoud
When I play single-player Mastermind I use self-imposed restrictions that force “bad” guesses, for example: 1) Consecutive guesses differ by exactly 1 insertion and 1 deletion. 2) Consecutive guesses...
View ArticleBy: Brian Hayes
Again, thanks for reporting this. When I discovered the cause of the problem, I was amazed that the program worked at all. In computing the standard deviation, I subtract the mean \(\mu\) from each of...
View ArticleBy: Eric Isaacson
My Wordle solving takes a different approach. I harvest the charts (the grids of colored squares with no letters revealed) posted by people who have worked the puzzle earlier in the same day, and...
View ArticleBy: Brian Hayes
This is brilliant! Looking on it as a trick for scoring well in Wordle, one might consider it on the edge of cheating, but I think it’s actually another game entirely. If you’d be willing to share, I’d...
View ArticleBy: Alok
Typo: “The four green tiles in row four confirm…” should be “five green tiles…”
View ArticleBy: Eric Isaacson
I figure the published charts are a part of the game, as they were explicitly programmed by the author as a brilliantly clever feature to make the game go viral. The author may have thought the charts...
View ArticleBy: Anne
Thanks for an interesting and educational discussion of this topic. As a decidedly suboptimal human player, I also like to console myself that another hurdle that impairs my performance is lack of...
View ArticleBy: computer scientist
Independently, I used your idea of how to find the best first guess, and extended it to finding the best triple of guesses chosen in advance. The difference is that an excellent first guess may not be...
View ArticleBy: computer scientist
The next level, which I haven’t done, would be to pick 3 guesses that optimize something, such as maximal probability of a unique word left. That would require checking 12000^3*2309 word combos. The...
View ArticleBy: doodle jump 2
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