PUZZLE & ALGORITHMPLAYGROUND

Instructor view

Instructor solutions and discussion notes

Wrong Wordle: SCARF produces four distinct patterns. The important idea is information gain, not guessing a likely answer.

Higher or Lower: Guess the midpoint each time. This halves the remaining possibilities and guarantees success within seven guesses for 1–100.

20 Counters: Leave a multiple of four. Respond so the two players’ moves total four.

Robot Maze: Depth-first search marks visited squares, explores one route until it reaches a dead end, then retraces its path to the most recent junction. The demonstration includes explicit backtracking moves.

Tic-Tac-Toe: Check in order: win now, block a loss, take center, take a corner, then take a side. The five boards provide one example of each rule.

Towers of Hanoi: Move the smaller stack aside, move the largest disk, then rebuild the smaller stack. Minimum moves: 2ⁿ − 1.

Eight Queens: Place one queen per row; when no safe square remains, backtrack and revise the previous placement.

Information and decisions

Wrong Wordle

You are not trying to guess the answer. Find a word that separates the four possibilities as clearly as possible.

Possible answers: TABLE · CABLE · SABLE · FABLE

Before looking: how many different response patterns do you predict?

Enter five letters to test a guess.

0different response groupsSome answers still produce the same information.