Re: cows and bulls

On Feb 13, 10:43 pm, "ramu" <ramu....@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Hi,
>  can anyone give me the algorithm for cows and bulls game which takes
> minimum number of passes to guess a 4-digit number?
>

This isn't optimal but does almost as well.

Each turn:

Get the list of all possibles remaining.
clear container for candidate move
For x from list.start to list.finish
  zero out score counts
  For y from list.start to list.finish
    calculate score for list[x] if answer is list[y]
    count[score]++;
  end for
  if the max in count is less than the current candidate's
    set x as the new candidate
  end if
end for
return candidate

Basically it looks for a guess that will minimize
the number of remaining possibles whatever the
results of the guess are.

The optimal strategy sometimes makes a guess that
can not be a solution and sometimes leaves larger
than minimum possibles behind. Classic paper on
the subject was by Knuth on mastermind.

---
Geoff