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2018 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

An Optimal Strategy for Static Black-Peg Mastermind with Three Pegs

verfasst von : Gerold Jäger, Frank Drewes

Erschienen in: Algorithmic Game Theory

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Mastermind is a famous game played by a codebreaker against a codemaker. We investigate its static (also called non-adaptive) black-peg variant. Given c colors and p pegs, the codemaker has to choose a secret, a p-tuple of c colors, and the codebreaker asks a set of questions all at once. Like the secret, a question is a p-tuple of c colors. The codemaker then tells the codebreaker how many pegs in each question are correct in position and color. Then the codebreaker has one final question to find the secret. His aim is to use as few of questions as possible. Our main result is an optimal strategy for the codebreaker for \(p=3\) pegs and an arbitrary number c of colors using \( \lfloor 3c/2 \rfloor +1\) questions.
A reformulation of our result is that the metric dimension of \( \mathbb {Z}_n \times \mathbb {Z}_n \times \mathbb {Z}_n\) is equal to \( \lfloor 3n/2 \rfloor \).

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Fußnoten
1
Note that in [6] the final question was not taken into account.
 
2
The case \(p=1\) is trivial for both games: exactly c questions are needed.
 
3
For \(c=4\), this strategy with 6 questions is not feasible, as the shifting step does not work. However, changing peg 3 of the third question from color 4 to color 3 leads to a feasible strategy with 6 questions.
 
4
For \(c=1\), this strategy with 1 question is not defined, and the strategy with 0 questions (i.e., only the final question) is optimal.
 
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Metadaten
Titel
An Optimal Strategy for Static Black-Peg Mastermind with Three Pegs
verfasst von
Gerold Jäger
Frank Drewes
Copyright-Jahr
2018
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99660-8_25

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