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Optimal guessing in ‘Guess Who’

Are you Richard? Are you Anne? We look at the strategic problem in the children’s guessing game Guess Who, which is a form of zero-sum symmetric game with perfect information. We discuss some preliminary strategic insights and formally derive an optimal strategy and win-probabilities for the game. W...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: O’Neill, Ben
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7946196/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33690608
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247361
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author O’Neill, Ben
author_facet O’Neill, Ben
author_sort O’Neill, Ben
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description Are you Richard? Are you Anne? We look at the strategic problem in the children’s guessing game Guess Who, which is a form of zero-sum symmetric game with perfect information. We discuss some preliminary strategic insights and formally derive an optimal strategy and win-probabilities for the game. We discuss the first-mover advantage in the game and other strategic aspects coming out of the optimal strategy. While the paper is based on the popular children’s game, our analysis generalises the actual game by allowing any initial game state with an arbitrarily large number of starting characters. With the aid of these mathematical results you can now comprehensively thrash your young children and be a terrible parent!
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spelling pubmed-79461962021-03-19 Optimal guessing in ‘Guess Who’ O’Neill, Ben PLoS One Research Article Are you Richard? Are you Anne? We look at the strategic problem in the children’s guessing game Guess Who, which is a form of zero-sum symmetric game with perfect information. We discuss some preliminary strategic insights and formally derive an optimal strategy and win-probabilities for the game. We discuss the first-mover advantage in the game and other strategic aspects coming out of the optimal strategy. While the paper is based on the popular children’s game, our analysis generalises the actual game by allowing any initial game state with an arbitrarily large number of starting characters. With the aid of these mathematical results you can now comprehensively thrash your young children and be a terrible parent! Public Library of Science 2021-03-10 /pmc/articles/PMC7946196/ /pubmed/33690608 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247361 Text en © 2021 Ben O’Neill http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
O’Neill, Ben
Optimal guessing in ‘Guess Who’
title Optimal guessing in ‘Guess Who’
title_full Optimal guessing in ‘Guess Who’
title_fullStr Optimal guessing in ‘Guess Who’
title_full_unstemmed Optimal guessing in ‘Guess Who’
title_short Optimal guessing in ‘Guess Who’
title_sort optimal guessing in ‘guess who’
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7946196/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33690608
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247361
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