Twenty questions

The strangest insights can sometimes come from the most ordinary situations. Earlier this week, as I was spending some time with the Imaginary Friends, someone mentioned that he was trying to defeat an online "20 Questions" program by saying no to the questions and then giving a wrong answer when asked for the thing. I responded that maybe since the program was online, there would be an "averaging" system in place that ensures that if the majority of players were sincere with the game, the wrong answers would eventually be smoothed over.

That's when it hit me: Twenty yes-or-no questions amounts to 20 bits of data; by asking twenty yes-or-no questions, you can differentiate among 2^20 or 1,048,576 different things! (Actually, when I got the insight, I erroneously thought that there were less than 2^20 particles in the Universe. Exponents were not my thing... ^_^)

The key proposition, I think, in the twenty questions game is that the million or so things you can think of should all inhabit some sort of domain. In my friend's case, the domain was anime characters. I'm sure there are a lot of anime characters on all anime and mangas, but are there a million?

What I took away from this thought process was that quite contrary to my intuition, something as paltry as just twenty questions can hold so much information about an object. That is the mystifying effect people get when the program correctly guesses the object or character they are thinking of.

Thanks for reading.

Song in my head: Nickelback, "Photograph".