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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.