Playing Mastermind with GoldSim

Posted by Ryan Roper

This last weekend, I went into nerd mode and created a GoldSim version of the classic game Mastermind. If you're not familiar with Mastermind, here's the Wikipedia article about it: Mastermind (board game). According to the article, "Mastermind...is a code-breaking game for two players. The modern game with pegs was invented in 1970 by Mordecai Meirowitz, an Israeli postmaster and telecommunications expert. It resembles an earlier pencil and paper game called Bulls and Cows that may date back a century or more." I play this game with my kids and it often leaves me musing about what kind of strategy or algorithm I might devise to more systematically make guesses to solve the code. This musing usually lasts about 5 or 10 minutes before I decide it's not worth my time and I go on with my life. However, recently I thought it would be a fun and interesting exercise to create a GoldSim version of Mastermind.

White Space

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

The way you use white space in your GoldSim expressions can make a significant difference in readability. In this post, I walk through a series of examples that illustrate my personal preferences and pet peeves, which I hope might be useful for you as you establish guidelines within your modeling team.

Review of Academic Journal Articles that Refer to GoldSim

Posted by Jason Lillywhite

I recently searched for academic journal articles using Google Scholar to see what kinds of GoldSim applications have been written about in the past year or so. Despite the limitations inherent in this type of search, I was able to compile a reasonable list of modeling application categories. The results of this search returned a surprisingly broad spectrum of use cases in engineering, science and business. I was expecting to see one or two dominant areas of focus but instead found a rather uniform spectrum. Many of the applications incorporated uncertainty and/or decision support, which I was pleased to see.