Mastermind the Board Game

Mastermind is a board game wherein the goal is to

break the code of the opponent (if you are the code breaker).
If you are the code maker, all you have to do is to choose a
pattern of four pegs, wait for the opponent to place his guess,
tell the opponent if he got a peg in the right position with the
right color (using a colored small peg) or if he got a peg with
the right color but wrong position (white small peg), and hope
your opponent doesn’t guess your code correctly.

The game will be played by an even number of times, and there six different colors of the “code”
pegs. If there are duplicate colors in the guess, they can’t all be awarded a small peg unless they
correspond to the same number of duplicate colors in the hidden code. The code maker gets a point for
every guess made by the code breaker, and a bonus if the code breaker failed to guess the code after 12
guesses. The one with the most points win.

There are 6x6x6x6=1296 different possible combinations. Practically speaking, one particular
combination that allows the code breaker to know the code after six guesses (and so require a seventh to
reveal his knowledge of the solution) is (1, 2, 2, 1), (2, 3, 5, 4), (3, 3, 1, 1), (4, 5, 2, 4), (5, 6, 5, 6), (6, 6, 4,
3). Keep in mind that the six colors of the pegs corresponds to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

According to Knuth, if you choose 1122 as the first move, then you will have at most 256
possible solutions left, thus minimizing the largest partition element (worst-case strategy). As for
Irving, 1123 is the best combination if you want to maximize your expected payoff (expected-
case strategy). In Neuwirth’s view, 1234 is the best move if you want to obtain the highest
amount of information that can be gotten from a guess.

In 1993, Mami Koyama and Tony Lai (Koyama, K. and Lai, T. W. "An Optimal Mastermind
Strategy." J. Recr. Math. 25, 251-256, 1993.) developed the best strategy game that will allow you to win
in 4.341 moves, with 5 at the most.