Playing Mastermind with Wordle-like Feedback

TL;DR

This paper introduces Clear Mastermind, an extension of the classic game with Wordle-inspired feedback, analyzing the minimum guesses needed to solve the code based on game parameters.

Contribution

It presents a novel variant of Mastermind with enhanced feedback and studies the optimal number of guesses required for different game configurations.

Findings

Determined the minimum guesses needed for various game sizes.

Compared the difficulty of Clear Mastermind to traditional Mastermind.

Provided insights into how feedback precision affects game complexity.

Abstract

We introduce an extension of Mastermind called Clear Mastermind with enhanced feedback inspired by that from Wordle. The only difference between Clear Mastermind and Mastermind is a rule that provides more precise feedback, as found in Wordle. In Clear Mastermind, the feedback contains the positions of the colors the codebreaker guessed correctly and the positions of colors that appear in the answer but in different positions. We explore the fewest number of guesses that a codebreaker requires to find the answer in Clear Mastermind according to its two parameters: the number of colors and the length of the answer.