A Mathematical Approach to the Simple Bulls and Cows Code Breaking Game

Scientific Essay from the year 2015 in the subject Mathematics - Miscellaneous language: English abstract: This document describes the game of Bulls and Cows and the research previously done on it. We then proceed to discuss our simplified algorithm which can be used practically by humans during course of play. An extended version of the algorithm which leverages computational power to guess the code quickly and more efficiently has also been explored. Lastly extensive human trials have been conducted to study the effective- ness of the algorithm and it has been shown that the algorithm results in a marked decrease in the average number of guesses in which a code is guessed by the code-breaker.