Centaur, I will certainly miss your participation. The comment you seem angry at was not meant as anything but gentle and friendly irony.

However, I take exception to your characterisation of this game (the current round of the game, specifically) as a "children’s game, trying to guess what someone is thinking" and, as you imply, as having no "educational value".

First, let me say I did not introduce the 20 questions format here, and I am not particularly fond of it; when I started this round, I had a very interesting pair of galaxies in mind the study of whose interaction is extremely educating and fascinating; at the moment when it was my turn I was unable to come up with a nicely clued riddle, so I did a round of 20 questions again for lack of a better idea. I tried to make up for the slow progress of this format by checking in on the questions regularly and promptly and by dropping a hint here and there.

In the process of chasing the pair of galaxies I sent you all looking for, several avenues of narrowing down can be pursued - trying to zoom in on the constellation (that was done, but on and off), trying to make out in which catalogue(s) the pair are or are not listed; trying to elucidate the type of relationship between those galaxies: Is there a strong tidal relation, is there a starburst, which kind of matter is being exchanged, are the galaxies - or one of them - active (specifically, is a quasar involved), what is a plausible distance range for the pair ("is z<2?"), among many. Having gotten a rough idea, it might be a good idea to browse the parent sites of this board to see if some galaxies fitting the bill have been discussed there in, say, the last year. This is a game, not an exam, and I am a total layman, so you can be quite certain that I won't send you on a fool's errand for some arcane galaxy pair that got one mention in the appendix of Astrophysical Journal in 1988 or so. The galaxies aren’t visually prominent, as I told you, so it is safe to infer that there is a story about these two galaxies; and in fact there is. It is very educating, and it is not that hard to find.

Another aspect is to have fun cracking the nut together. That is, seeing what strategy your fellow quizzers are pursuing. Can you help them along, can you expand on their line of reasoning, can you pick up a ball and play it back to them, can you use one of my side comments to get further (as Jeff did expertly, even though I inadvertently mislead him) etc?

You chose not to pursue these possible avenues; you checked in twice and took two direct guesses at two pairs in the NGC when the field was not very much narrowed down - in fact when you don't even know if these galaxies are in the NGC at all.

Now you seem to be angry at my – gently ironic, or that’s how I see it – remark that maybe this is not too promising a strategy at this point in the game. Your answer is calling the game childish and denying it any educational value.

I am sorry if I am not up to your standards, but I'll state explicitly that I strongly disagree with you here.

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Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem.