The show is celebrating its 50th anniversary, why do you think it remains popular with audiences across decades? Why do you think people love the programme so much? Knuth (1976-77) showed that the codebreaker can always succeed in five or fewer moves (i.e., knows the code after four guesses). His technique uses a greedy strategy that minimizes the number of remaining possibilities at each step, and requires 4.478 guesses on average, assuming equally likely code choice. Irving (1978-79) subsequently found a strategy with slightly smaller average length. Koyama and Lai (1993) described a strategy that minimizes the average number of guesses, requiring on average 4.340 guesses, although may require up to six in the worst case. A slight modification also described by Koyama and Lai (1993) increases the average to 4.341, but reduces the maximum number of guesses required to five.

Mastermind International was an annual playoff between winners of various international versions of the show (or the nearest equivalents in some countries) and ran for five years between 1979 and 1983. In 1975 The Goodies featured Mastermind in the episode " Frankenfido" when a dog ( Bill Oddie in a suit) appeared on the show and managed to correctly answer questions asked of it as they all had answers that could be represented by growls, such as "bark" and "ruff". The Channel 4 Prank programme Balls of Steel parodied Mastermind with its sketch The Alex Zane Cleverness Game, in which experts were quizzed on their specialist subjects (included were "The Life of Anne Frank", " Eurovision Song Contest Winners", and " Hercule Poirot"). Unbeknown to the experts, the show was a hoax, and incorrect answers were included to frustrate them whenever they supplied the correct answer. Mastermind' soon returned to the BBC, this time on BBC Two, for a Celebrity Special broadcast in 2002. July 2003 saw the first full series of ‘Mastermind’ in six years, with a new Question Master, John Humphrys, best known as presenter of Radio Four’s 'Today' programme.Sir David Attenborough presented the first ever champion Nancy Wilkinson with her trophy in 1972. He was Director of Programmes at BBC at the time. a decoding board, with a shield at one end covering a row of four large holes, and twelve (or ten, or eight, or six) additional rows containing four large holes next to a set of four small holes; King also wrote in what was then a new feature for computer games: a league table, or leaderboard, on which players could record their score. "For the first few days people vied with one another to get higher on the league table," he says. "People were clearly getting better and better, and then someone was at the top of the league table with an impossibly ridiculous average." In the very first series of Mastermind in 1972, all of the finalists were women, leading people to speculate whether a man could ever win the show.

If there are duplicate colors in the guess, they cannot all be awarded a key peg unless they correspond to the same number of duplicate colors in the hidden code. For example, if the hidden code is red-red-blue-blue and the player guesses red-red-red-blue, the codemaker will award two colored key pegs for the two correct reds, nothing for the third red as there is not a third red in the code, and a colored key peg for the blue. No indication is given of the fact that the code also includes a second blue. [10]

What has been the most memorable specialist subject for you across the series so far since you’ve been the host?

Mastermind is a game for two players. One player becomes the codemaker by letting the other play think they are trying to guess four colors, when in reality there are only three colors used. The goal of the code maker is to give hints that make it difficult for their opponent to determine what color each letter represents while still being relatively easy for the codemaker to remember. Trouble (1965) Television Datepad – Wednesday". "Herald TV Guide", Sydney Morning Herald, 1 June 1981, p.4 . Retrieved 11 May 2020. On their 2005 Christmas Special, comedy duo French & Saunders parodied the show with Jennifer Saunders playing Abigail Wilson, a pensioner whose special subject is ceramic teapots. She passes on all but one question, which she answers incorrectly. a b Nelson, Toby (9 March 2000). "A Brief History of the Master MindTM Board Game". Archived from the original on 6 September 2015 . Retrieved 6 August 2014. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL ( link)Clive Myrie: Becoming host of Mastermind is a big, big job". BBC News. 19 August 2021 . Retrieved 2 May 2022. Mastermind (TV series)" redirects here. For international versions and unrelated TV shows of the same or similar names, see Mastermind § Television.

an aloof, bearded, red-headed man and [an] Eurasian beauty. The arts editor asked me who they were…. He said he knew and it would be important to the story” (Patricia Rice, St. Louis Post-Dispatch) Hosted by BBC journalist and presenter Clive Myrie since 2021, the new series of Mastermind will see 96 contenders follow the tried and tested formula of facing two minutes of questions on their specialist subject, followed by two and a half minutes on general knowledge. Q&A with Mastermind host Clive Myrie code pegs of six different colors (or more; see Variations below), with round heads, which will be placed in the large holes on the board; and Traditionally, players can only earn points when playing as the codemaker. The codemaker gets one point for each guess the codebreaker makes. An extra point is earned by the codemaker if the codebreaker is unable to guess the exact pattern within the given number of turns. (An alternative is to score based on the number of key pegs placed.) The winner is the one who has the most points after the agreed-upon number of games are played.

Q&A with Mastermind host Clive Myrie

To what I recall nothing really stood out on the show apart from the fact that occasionally a taxi driver and train driver won the series of mastermind at some time during it's run. Or that from time to time some poor contestant fell apart under the pressure of the situation and embarrassingly made a fool of themselves. You would certainly feel for them when they flopped in front of millions of viewers; very similar to an actor on stage fluffing his lines at the theater. Mordechai Meirowitz, an Israeli telephone technician, developed Mastermind in 1970 from an existing game of apocryphal origin, Bulls and Cows, which used numbers instead of colored pegs. Nobody, by the way, knows where Bulls and Cows came from. Computer scientists who adapted the first known versions in the 1960s variously remembered the game to me as one hundred and one thousand years old. Whatever its age, it’s clear nobody ever did as well out of Bulls and Cows as Meirowitz, who retired from game development and lived comfortably off royalties not long after selling the Mastermind prototype to Invicta, a British plastics firm expanding from industrial parts and window shutters into games and toys. Nancy Wilkinson became the first winner of Mastermind in 1972. Walker took the title of oldest female winner from Isabelle Heward, who won in 2017 with her specialist subject the life and films of Billy Wilder. Last year, 24-year-old Jonathan Gibson was crowned the youngest ever champion. The earliest reference to Bulls and Cows is in the work of Dr. Frank King. In 1968, King was studying for a PhD in electrical engineering at Cambridge University and looking for something to implement on the university's Titan computer, which had recently been equipped with Multics, a time-sharing operating system allowing multiple users to access one computer concurrently and remotely. Discovery Channel's Mastermind (2001) was hosted by Clive Anderson. The commercials shortened the amount of time available for answering questions and lasted just one series. This was also the first to go "interactive". By using the red button viewers could play the general knowledge section throughout the series. These questions had been written specifically to afford both standard and multiple-choice format in presentation. There was a one-off competition between the four highest scoring viewers. [ citation needed]