Optimal schemes for combinatorial query problems with integer feedback

DOI10.5070/C63261997MaRDI QIDQ6138906zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Anders Martinsson

Publication date 16 December 2023

Published in Combinatorial Theory (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.09496

zbMATH Keywords

query complexitycombinatorial gamesmastermindcoin-weighing

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

2-person games (91A05) Combinatorial games (91A46) Communication complexity, information complexity (68Q11)

Abstract: A query game is a pair of a set $Q$ of queries and a set $mathcalF$ of functions, or codewords $f:QightarrowmathbbZ.$ We think of this as a two-player game. One player, Codemaker, picks a hidden codeword $finmathcalF$. The other player, Codebreaker, then tries to determine $f$ by asking a sequence of queries $qinQ$, after each of which Codemaker must respond with the value $f(q)$. The goal of Codebreaker is to uniquely determine $f$ using as few queries as possible. Two classical examples of such games are coin-weighing with a spring scale, and Mastermind, which are of interest both as recreational games and for their connection to information theory. In this paper, we will present a general framework for finding short solutions to query games. As applications, we give new self-contained proofs of the query complexity of variations of the coin-weighing problems, and prove new results that the deterministic query complexity of Mastermind with $n$ positions and $k$ colors is $Theta(nlogk/logn+k)$ if only black-peg information is provided, and $Theta(nlogk/logn+k/n)$ if both black- and white-peg information is provided. In the deterministic setting, these are the first up to constant factor optimal solutions to Mastermind known for any $kgeq{n}^{1-o(1)}$.

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