[mqtx]

That reminds me, I wrote it for iPhone when it was released in 2007 - back then there was no App Store, so apps could only be written for browsers. I think I implemented it whenever I learned a new language. By the way, I noticed that Claude, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek - none of those LLMs can solve Mastermind. They get lost after a few iterations, no matter how good the prompt instructions are. Source: https://github.com/muquit/iphonemm - there is a link to play on that page.

[fuzzfactor]

I'm in an older generation, but like some other commenters started young with logic games as a preteen. I got into a school that was recognized for its academic games program but that was years before Mastermind came out.

By then I was in college with some of my high school buddies when one of them got the original board game. These were not actually that common even among those who liked thinking games since they were about $10, for $1 worth of plastic. And the box was way small compared to the full-size popular board games which were about $5.

It was quite interesting that there were diverse international people pictured on the cover and it didn't take long to realize this was a game where no players need to speak the same language at all.

By the time I got my Atari computer, this was the only game I ever coded since it's absolutely perfect to play having the computer in the role of "codemaker". I had never seen or heard of a computer mouse but I had my trackball for playing Centipedes and Missle Command so used it to point & click, then before I was done I was dragging & dropping the colors from their repository to the hot spots. I was simulating picking & placing like the board game.

Eventually I used two columns so two players could play against the Atari simultaneously, each with their own trackball or joystick. Since it was always basically a "one-player" game doing the solving, then two people could solve at once. I was going to suggest trying it that way next time but I don't know if it's as straightforward to use two mice and associate one with each player.

[conception]

You can ask them to write a script to solve it however and it is a trivial task for an LLM.

[mqtx]

I'm talking about interactive play with an LLM - for example, explaining the rules and scoring in detail first. Then I tell it to pick colors, and I provide the score. When the score indicate 2 colors matched, it's supposed to keep those 2 colors constant in the next move. But after I pointed out that it forgot again after the next move and continued making the same mistake, it was Claude 3.5. So at the end I said, 'It looks like you can never solve this puzzle. Now that you know all the rules, can you write the game in JavaScript?' Sure enough, it did, and it worked on the first try - and was much prettier than my version. Same for ChatGPT, DeepSeek.