Spiele - Ein "Superhirn"-Spiel lösen

What's it about?

In the two-player master mind game one player must bread a hidden color code preset by the other. The code breaker has seven or eight tries to set the correct code and receives from the other player information about "right color, wrong position" and "right color, correct position" by black or white pegs.

Concept

As Donald Knuth (yes, the author of TeX)  published shortly after the game was released, the information received from the black and white pegs can only be used to exclude codes from the set of all possible codes. From the possiblities remaining, any one may be chosen for the next try for validation. This is a mere brute force strategy. This approach has been programmed in a VBA module in an Excel workbook and may be requested by interested visitors.

Demo

The following video shows, after starting a new game, the list of all possibilities, the selection of an arbitrary code and the, try after try, the reduction of the set of remaining codes. New tries, along with the validation result in black and white peg counts, are appended to the list of previous tries. Finally, one code is left over, and the number of black pegs is equal to the numbe of positions in the code.