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Playing Several Variants of Mastermind with Constant-Size Memory is not Harder than with Unbounded Memory

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Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8986))

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  • International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms

Abstract

We investigate a version of the Mastermind game, where the codebreaker may only store a constant number of questions and answers, called Constant-Size Memory Mastermind, which was recently introduced by Doerr and Winzen. We concentrate on the most difficult case, where the codebreaker may store only one question and one answer, called Size-One Memory Mastermind. We consider two variants of the game: the original one, where the answer is coded with white and black pegs, and the simplified one, where only black pegs are used in the answer. We show that for two pegs and an arbitrary number of colors, the number of questions needed by the codebreaker in an optimal strategy in the worst case for these games is equal to the corresponding number of questions in the games without a memory restriction. In other words, for these cases restricting the memory size does not make the game harder for the codebreaker. This is a continuation of a result of Doerr and Winzen, who showed that this holds asymptotically for a fixed number of colors and an arbitrary number of pegs. Furthermore, by computer search we determine additional pairs (p, c), where again the numbers of questions in an optimal strategy in the worst case for Size-One Memory Mastermind and original Mastermind are equal.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Umeå, 901-87, Umeå, Sweden

    Gerold Jäger

  2. Institute of Informatics, University of Warsaw, ul. Banacha 2, 02-097, Warszawa, Poland

    Marcin Peczarski

Authors
  1. Gerold Jäger
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  2. Marcin Peczarski
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marcin Peczarski .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Praha, Czech Republic

    Kratochvíl Jan

  2. University of Newcastle, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

    Mirka Miller

  3. University of Minnesota, Duluth Department of Mathematics, Duluth, Minnesota, USA

    Dalibor Froncek

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Jäger, G., Peczarski, M. (2015). Playing Several Variants of Mastermind with Constant-Size Memory is not Harder than with Unbounded Memory. In: Jan, K., Miller, M., Froncek, D. (eds) Combinatorial Algorithms. IWOCA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8986. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19315-1_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19315-1_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19314-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19315-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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