Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/3/84; site talcott.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!unc!mcnc!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!talcott!gjk From: gjk@talcott.UUCP (Greg Kuperberg) Newsgroups: net.math Subject: Re: Re: MasterMind, Jotto, entropy Message-ID: <345@talcott.UUCP> Date: Sat, 9-Mar-85 22:54:18 EST Article-I.D.: talcott.345 Posted: Sat Mar 9 22:54:18 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 11-Mar-85 07:24:33 EST References: <246@cmu-cs-g.ARPA> <6350@boring.UUCP> Organization: Harvard Lines: 24 > There is an amusing variant of Jotto etc. in which a player does not have > to freeze the initial position, as long as the answers given are consistent > with *some* initial position. This can, in principle, also be done in the > original game, in which case it is cheating. For a human player, it is > hard to play this "Floating" Jotto to his/her advantage, since it is hard > not to make mistakes. For a program, it is quite feasible: keep a list of > initial positions that are still open, and when posed a question, divide > the items in the list into classes, depending on the answer required for > each item, and give the answer corresponding to the largest class (which > then becomes the new list). ... > Lambert Meertens This is only feasible for a small number of holes. Suppose the computer had to deal with, say, twenty holes and ten colors. Clearly remembering all 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations is at once impossible and overkill. Is there any good way to represent appropriate subsets of the space of MasterMind combinations? (good as in computation time for winning the game, that is) --- Greg Kuperberg harvard!talcott!gjk "2*x^5-10*x+5=0 is not solvable by radicals." -Evariste Galois.