[long]

In computer science academia, this kind of game is called grammar induction (of which inferring regular expressions is a special case).

A classic algorithm for inferring regular expressions was given by Angluin: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/teaching/s10/pape...

(This isn't quite the same setup as you're thinking of but there are a ton of variations on the basic idea)

[eru]

Thanks. I had figured out that grammar induction was the right word to look for a while ago. (But took me a bit to find it.) I know the paper you linked to, but yes, it's not quite the right setup.

[long]

There's a conference on grammar induction called ICGI; might wanna browse through the proceedings to see if there's anything closer.