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Poster

Learning Multiple Secrets in Mastermind

Milind Prabhu · David Woodruff

Hall C 4-9 #2100

Abstract: In the Generalized Mastermind problem, there is an unknown subset H of the hypercube 0,1d containing n points. The goal is to learn H by making a few queries to an oracle which given a point q in 0,1d, returns the point in H nearest to q. We give a two-round adaptive algorithm for this problem that learns H while making at most exp(O~(dlogn)). Furthermore, we show that any r-round adaptive randomized algorithm that learns H with constant probability must make exp(Ω(d3(r1))) queries even when the input has poly(d) points; thus, any poly(d) query algorithm must necessarily use Ω(loglogd) rounds of adaptivity. We give optimal query complexity bounds for the variant of the problem where queries are allowed to be from 0,1,2d. We also study a continuous variant of the problem in which H is a subset of unit vectors in Rd and one can query unit vectors in Rd. For this setting, we give a O(nd/2) query deterministic algorithm to learn the hidden set of points.

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