[napping_penguin]

Good catch but it's intentional. The engine behind the first simulator for 4-cards is adversarial and hence appears a bit deterministic.

- Adversarial engine: Will always respond with an answer to your query such that it maximizes the number of remaining permutations (used in the first simulator)

- Honest engine: This one will actually have one random hidden permutation that will be uncovered by your queries (this is used in the second simulator)

The reason why the adversarial engine is used up there is because if the user does not play optimally, they will be forced into 6 queries or more (and hence will appreciate the difficulty of the problem better). If you do self-play on the lower simulator (which has the 4,8,16 card variants) you will have the experience you expect.

[nick_g]

This behavior also confused me. Perhaps I’m not the target audience for your post, but some text describing why the simulator behaves the way it does would have been quite helpful

[napping_penguin]

Thank you for the feedback, I will address this in the post.