Search Algorithms for Mastermind
  his paper presents two novel approaches to solving the classic board game
mastermind, including a variant of simulated annealing (SA) and a technique we
term maximum expected reduction in consistency (MERC). In addition, we compare
search results for these algorithms to two baseline search methods: a random,
uninformed search and the method of minimizing maximum query partition sets as
originally developed by both Donald Knuth and Peter Norvig.
