Debugging, The Scientific Method, and Mastermind

The Scientific Method Building a Model of Our World Getting inside the black box

Building a General Model What causes cancer? We ask a series of questions, conduct experiments, and try to associate cause and effect.

Diagnosing Specific Cases What is wrong with this patient? Now, in a specific case, we conduct tests and compare the answers to the disease model that we have already built.

Diagnosis – A Different Domain What’s wrong with the car?

What’s Common to These Examples? There’s some underlying situation. We cannot directly observe the entire system. But we can “probe” it with specific questions. The answers we get help us to build a more and more complete model of the system. We want to ask as few questions as possible in the process. Why?

So How Should We Choose Our Questions? We want to find a specific location in this territory. What’s the most efficient way to proceed?

With Each Answer We Get a Better Model Begin with an initial model that is as rich as possible. Loop until only one possible answer remains: Based on what we know so far, choose a question that cuts out as many possibilities as we can. Use the answer to build a better model.

Mastermind – The Game

How To Play Player 1 creates a pattern of colors in her 4 holes (the inside of the black box). Player 2 must discover the pattern through a series of guesses (experiments) and replies (results). At each move: Player 2 puts down a candidate pattern. Player 1 replies with a set of black and white pegs: Each black peg corresponds to a peg in the right place. Each white peg corresponds to a correct peg in the wrong place.

An Example If the secret sequence is... And your guess is... Your score would be...

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