A vault holds a secret token chosen from wordlist. Every token has the same length. You may probe any token w; the vault replies with the number of positions where w matches the secret token exactly. You must produce the deterministic minimax transcript: starting from the full vault, repeatedly pick the probe that minimizes the worst-case remaining vault size.

At each step let candidates be the tokens still possible. For every candidate w in candidates compute the partition sizes by match count matches(w, c) for all c in candidates. The worst case for w is max partition size. Pick the w with smallest worst case, breaking ties by lexicographically smallest token. Probe it, record [w, matches(w, secret)], and filter candidates to those with the same match count. Stop when the probe matches the secret in all positions. Return the ordered transcript as an array of [token, matchCount] pairs.

This is the deterministic minimax strategy for the Token Vault. It is fully reproducible, no randomness, and the choice set at each step is restricted to current candidates only.