Codebreaker

Codebreaker is a game of logic and deduction with the aim being to work out the secret combination from the given information. It has been shown that all games using four colours can be solved with 4 or fewer guesses, and all games using six colours can be solved in 5 or fewer guesses. One of the best strategies involves working out which guess will eliminate the largest number of valid combinations. However, this strategy is quite difficult to do when playing the game for real. Another good strategy is just to pick any random guess, so long as it is consistent with the information you already have. In that case, all games can be solved in 10 or fewer guesses, but the average is around 4.6. There is no general formula for working out the maximum or the average, and we still don’t know what the best solutions are for 8 or more colours.