Mastermind!

Crack the code!

Description

Matlab implementation of the 'Mastermind (R)' board game
 
 mastermind([number of colors],...
            [number of columns],...
            [number of rows])
 
 default values: mastermind(6,4,10)
 
 Click on pegs on the right to choose the color.
 Click on the empty peg boxes to place a peg
   (keep clicking to cycle through colors).
 Click on 'GO' to get results for that row.
 
 White indicates correct color, but not correct location
 Black indicates correct color in the correct location
 
 Note: you can cheat by clicking on the boxes in the top row to reveal the hidden pegs.

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.1.0 (R14SP3)

[John D'Errico]

Buggy code should be tested before submission.

Most of the buttons on this gui work. The one button which fails is the "go" button. Its a rather important
one. That button does absolutely nothing. Perhaps "stop",
or "pause" may be a better label for it. ;-)

I'd normally give code with serious bugs a "poor" rating, but I'll choose to give it no numerical rating at all in hopes the author will correct it, since the rest of the gui seems to work.

[Ernold Blatford]

 

[Eduard van der Zwan]

I don't understand where John is talking about. The "go" button works perfectly. I realy like the option non default parameters

[John D'Errico]

Interesting. I dowloaded a new version. The go button now works. I don't know why. Given a fully working version, this now generally works properly in my tests, except...

There is one silly constraint - that the number of colors cannot be less than the total number of pegs. There is absolutely no reason why this cannot be. Unless you look more carefully at the code. The author has written the code to choose a solution that samples the peg colors WITHOUT replacement.

This behavior is undocumented, and it will likely result in some additional tests by users who might consider the possibility of replicated colors. Its trivial however to generate a solution that allows replicates. Looking more deeply into the code finds the real reason. The author has written the test for the number of pegs that match in a non-optimal manner, that apparently will not handle replicated colors in the solution.

Its too bad too. You might find it fun to try a game with only 2 peg colors, but many pegs. mastermind(2,10,10) An interesting question is, can you design a strategy that will always identify the solution for the mastermind(2,n) problem in less than n+1 tests?

[Krishna Lalith]

the way the program was written was excellant.

[Cedric Zoppolo]

Really simple and neat program. Quite like the original game board. Although there isn't an option for repeated colours...

[Christophe Morell]

Good game. Well programmed and simple to use.

[Aman Siddiqi]

This runs fantastic. And well written