Optimal schemes for combinatorial query problems with integer feedback

Abstract: A query game is a pair of a set $Q$ of queries and a set $\mathcal{F}$ of functions, or codewords $f:Q\rightarrow \mathbb{Z}.$ We think of this as a two-player game. One player, Codemaker, picks a hidden codeword $f\in \mathcal{F}$. The other player, Codebreaker, then tries to determine $f$ by asking a sequence of queries $q\in Q$, 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 $\Theta(n \log k/ \log n + k)$ if only black-peg information is provided, and $\Theta(n \log k / \log n + k/n)$ 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 $k\geq n<sup>{1-o(1)}$.