pymastermind

Description

A Python package designed to play, develop strategies/algorithms, and implement the classic MasterMind board game. It even includes a functioning, text-based implementation of MasterMind!

Installation

The source code for pymastermind is hosted on GitHub. You can install matermind through PyPI, with pip:

pip install pymastermind

Requirements

pymastermind requires the following libraries:

• pandas, used by the SelfGame object
• tqdm, used to display progress bars when finding next guess. Note: only some algorithms support progress bars. See "Algorithms" below.

Documentation

Read the full documentation for pymastermind here.

Example Usage

Play

Play a game against your computer, or have your computer play itself, by running main() and following text-based instructions.

>>> main() # initiate the game; print instructions & wait for inputs

Classes

Several useful classes are defined in the pymastermind module.

Code

Code objects are list instances designed to store a MasterMind codes. You can compare two codes by using the .compare() method. What's comparing?

>>> secret_code = Code(['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'])
>>> guess = Code(['b', 'c', 'j', 'd'])
>>> len(secret_code) == len(guess)
True
>>> secret_code.compare(guess)
(1, 2)

Note: code objects must be of the same length to comapre.

Game

Game objects are used to immitate gameplay.

>>> my_game = Game() # default: slots == 4, colors == ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
>>> secret_code = Code(['e', 'a', 'f', 'f'])
>>> my_game.guess # always the same for given setup; see Wikipedia article
['a', 'a', 'b', 'b']
>>> blacks_and_whites = secret_code.compare(my_game.guess)
>>> blacks_and_whites
(1, 0)
>>> my_game.new_guess(response, algorithm='minmax') # new guess using minmax algorithm (see below)
>>> my_game.guess
['a', 'c', 'c', 'd']
>>> my_game.back() # go back one turn
>>> my_game.guess
['a', 'a', 'b', 'b']

Read the documentation for an in-depth look at all the attributes and methods of a Game.

Algorithms

A new guess can be generated using several different algorithms. Currently, pymastermind has two algorithms implemented:

• random (default algorithm)
  • Set the guess to a random secret code possibility
  • No progress bar support yet
• minmax
  • Set the guess to the guess that has the highest min-max score of all guesses. Read more here.
  • Supports progress bars

See the full documentation for a more detailed description of the algorithms.

SelfGame

SelfGame is a subclass of Game that is used to "play" games with specified algorithms and obtain a pandas DataFrame full of information about the games played.

>>> my_self_game = SelfGame() # same defaults, so slots == 4, colors == ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
>>> df = my_self_game.play() # default: games == 10, algorithm == 'random'
>>> type(df)
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
>>> df.loc['Game 3', 'Turn 2'] # example query
Time                   0 days 00:00:00.000610
Start Possibilities                        23
End Possibilities                           4
Name: Game 3, dtype: object

License

MIT