Teacher wins Mastermind title". BBC News. 9 January 2002. Archived from the original on 8 August 2003 . Retrieved 29 December 2018.

Knuth, Donald (1976–1977). "The Computer as Master Mind" (PDF). J. Recr. Math. (9): 1–6. Archived (PDF) from the original on 4 March 2016. Sarah Clay, Commissioning Editor, says: “Mastermind is one of the BBC’s legacy shows and a real jewel in our schedule, with a simple yet highly effective format which has been popular with audiences for decades. It entertains and educates audiences, with many loyal fans playing along at home.” Running up to the final, Walker’s specialist subjects were photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, and the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein.Go for Broke! is a board game designed to teach the principles of probability and statistics. The object of play is to estimate numbers that are hidden from view (which have been generated at random). Players who guess correctly reveal their estimates, and players whose guesses were too low or high receive negative points. If there is no winner by the time the number of questions has been reached, the player with the most points is declared a winner. Payday (1975)

Koyama, Kenji; Lai, Tony (1993). "An Optimal Mastermind Strategy". Journal of Recreational Mathematics (25): 230–256. Being firm and no nonsense - I am billed as the 'interrogator' after all - but at the same time I'm willing on every contender to do their best and win. I hope they can at least feel that, as I fire questions at them like bullets from a machine gun! There is a numeral variety of the Mastermind in which a 4-digit number is guessed. [22] The 2021 web game Wordle has been compared to Mastermind. [23] Bowcott, Owen (8 October 2007). "Mastermind seeks more women". The Guardian. The show ... was the brainchild of the TV producer Bill Wright..., who drew on his wartime experiences of being interrogated by the Gestapo.In 2005, the show was spoofed on BBC Radio 4's The Now Show where the specialist subject was "Britishness", relating to the proposed test immigrants may have to take, to prove they can fit in with British society. Magnusson, Magnus (1998). I've started, so I'll finish: the story of Mastermind. London: Warner. ISBN 0-7515-2585-5. OCLC 43203453. The codebreaker continues guessing until he guesses the code correctly or until he reaches a maximum allowable number of guesses without having correctly identified the secret code. 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) Project: Stochastic Search Methods in Mastermind Game." http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~at1691/LittReview.html. Viaud,

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. 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. News - Leisure software". Home Computing Weekly. No.86. Argus Specialist Publications. 30 October 1984. p.4. In his early routines Bill Bailey would often parody the Mastermind music, finding it very sinister. He would then play the music on keyboard with an over-the-top hellish sounding climax. In the last episode of " Is It Bill Bailey?" he followed on from this performance with a sketch where he was a contestant on Mastermind, and it was implied that his specialist subject was the microwave cooking instructions on supermarket ready meals. As the camera panned out it became evident that the chair itself was on a platter, slowly turning in a giant microwave oven. Mastermind' was the brainchild of TV producer Bill Wright, a former RAF gunner, who drew on his wartime experience as a Prisoner of War in Germany of answering three questions - name, rank and number - to create the ‘Mastermind’ ritual of contestants being asked their name, occupation and specialist subject.Alice Walker (2022), aged 66, with the specialist subject The Peak District is the oldest ever female Mastermind champion. However, parasport athlete Kadeena Cox - who scored three points on 21 December 2016 in a Celebrity edition - scored all three points on her specialist subject of Arsenal FC and she is currently the only ever contestant to score no points in a round. 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)

The series created a winner every year (except in 1982 – when a Champion of Champions Special featuring the previous ten winners was won by Sir David Hunt) until, after more than 57,000 questions, ‘Mastermind’ left BBC TV in 1997. Spitting Image used the Mastermind format in a sketch where a Magnus Magnusson puppet asked questions of a Jeffrey Archer puppet whose specialist subject was himself. The twist was that Archer's puppet, being incapable of answering questions about himself without exaggeration or evasion, ends the round with zero points. 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]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. In 2003, the current BBC Two version premiered, hosted by John Humphrys. Whereas the original series had kept talk to a minimum (asking contestants only their name, occupation and specialist subject), the new run had at first included some conversational elements with contestants, at the start of the General Knowledge round (normally about the contestant's specialist subject). But these have been dropped since the 2011 series. Instead, there is now a brief monologue from the winner at the end of each episode about how pleased they are to have won. There is no discussion with the other contestants. It is also distinguished from the original BBC TV series because many more of the specialist subjects come from popular culture. This probably reflects cultural changes in the British middle classes in recent years. Unlike the original version, this version is studio-based. It is now made in MediaCity in Salford. However, due to asbestos being found at Granada's Manchester studios parts of the 2006 series were filmed at Yorkshire Television's Leeds studios). Cup Final Mastermind was an annual playoff between experts and supporters from the FA Cup Finalist teams they are supporting. It ran from 1978 and 1980. The highest overall Mastermind score is 41 points, set by Kevin Ashman in 1995, his specialist subject being "The Life of Martin Luther King Jr." Ashman went on to become six times IQA world champion. In addition he holds the record for the highest ever score on Brain of Britain and has been a member of the Eggheads since that series debut. Mastermind Champions – BBC One London – 3 May 1982". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 7 November 2014.