The Kodak Research Labs (like Bell Labs) let their researchers play. In the 1960's my father (who later devised the Bayer filter for digital cameras) coded this algorithm for "Jotto" the 5 letter word version of Mastermind.

Computers were so slow that one couldn't consider every word in the dictionary as a potential guess. He decided empirically on a sample size that played well enough.

I became a mathematician. From this childhood exposure, entropy was the first mathematical "concept" beyond arithmetic that I understood.