More than twenty questions
Mar. 14th, 2020 09:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcIn 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, past items thought of by players other than me include,
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
*Fictional items are fine, I am thinking of one in the current game and will update here once play is complete.
For example, I chose the Usher of the Black Rod only after finding a used book about that role available trivially cheaply. 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
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, past items thought of by players other than me include,
- the Great East Window of York Minster
- tangrams
- Iridium flares
- Murphy's Law
- the Canal du Midi
- Highland cattle
- knot throwing.
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 wrapturned out to mean that I had to learn a lot about plastics. In a previous not-online instance of the game I regretted thinking of
bubbleswhen interrogation turned to the question of how many are in the human body. On the basis of my knowing too little I have since avoided choosing items like,
- the turkey pardoned by the President at Thanksgiving
- the scroll,
Along the River During the Qingming Festival
- holographic optical tweezers
- orbital mind-control lasers*.
*Fictional items are fine, I am thinking of one in the current game and will update here once play is complete.
For example, I chose the Usher of the Black Rod only after finding a used book about that role available trivially cheaply. 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.
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Date: 2020-03-14 08:39 pm (UTC)Tangentially, I re-read Strange and Norrell recently, and was amused to realize that the one spell we see used a lot is basically binary search, or 20 questions. (Divide water into quarters, naming each quarter, like "Heaven Hell Earth Faerie", spell shows which quarter your target is in, repeat.)
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Date: 2020-03-15 07:28 am (UTC)