Some rights reserved! Vintage technology preserved.
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Actually it would be better referring specially to xenix286 due that regularly use to play mastermind (/usr/games/mind) delivered with the xenix286 game package. For newbies, a standalone xenix286 virtual machine can be installed automatically without any user interaction, see earlier writings on this here:
This mastermind implementation can be customized, player can change the number of colours 1 thru 9, code length from 2 to 5, and also the application can make a code or breaks code that is entered by the user, supposedly using rather weak heuristics.
Ripped the title from the famous book written by John Conway et al, since my childhood I always wanted to know what is the optimal strategy for the so-called game mastermind. It is a peg guess with 6 colours and 4 length code, both colour reuse and illegal guesses are allowed. Even Donald E. Knuth published a paper containing a heuristic approach decades ago that yields a strategy that guesses all codes in at most 5 tries - which exactly means that the 5th or earlier try is the code itself. Of course this could be suboptimal in general case but with this specific constraints - 6 colours, 4 length code - yields an optimal recipe. The heuristic itself minimizes the maximal number of elements in each subset per response classification in the remaining allowed codes.
Here you are a vintage cheat in 2021: a cheat sheet for classic mastermind ruleset. Generated a guess-response tree list here:
The classic tree format, leaves are denoted with sencence "Win in step [n]", guesses are CAPITALS, responses are small words padded with dots up to four characters. The messy python(2-3) code also prints a small summary after finishing tree generation, also determines maximal necessary steps - fortunately 5 in our case. Less than 5 is impossible!
Happy browsing the cheat sheet in split terminal sessions during mind gameplay!
Less relevant, but updated this blog's links section. Have fun!
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