Playing Mastermind with Wordle-like Feedback

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.