More than twenty questions

In writing about online fora last year I had mentioned the GROGGS discussion board system, associated with the University of Cambridge and which is soon to be shut down.

Among more serious discussion it was one of the places I enjoyed playing Infinity Questions. Imagine Twenty Questions, with yes/no answers, but going on for as long as necessary to determine what is being thought of. In playing it in a written computer-based medium we realized that at the start of the game it is possible to post the cryptographic hash of the thought-of thing so that it is clear that it was already decided. To give a clearer idea of the nature of the game, ( these are examples of things people thought of. )

Answering the questions is not simple. Especially, it is important to choose something that one could learn and answer an awful lot about, even unanticipated. For example, thinking of bubble wrap turned out to mean that I had to learn a lot about plastics. ( I avoid choosing items I cannot easily find out about. )

Of course one might also try to choose an item that is simple and not overly obscure while being hard enough to push into needing more than a hundred questions, for instance a particularly tough one was font, in the sense of a family thereof forming a typeface.