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Old 09-January-2009, 08:43 PM
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Centaur Centaur is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Arneb View Post
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.

My first two questions narrowed things down considerably for everyone. My latter two were leaps at the ultimate answer. Game theory is involved here. The strategy for winning Twenty Questions is different for when there is one player or many players, unless they are considered part of a team. In the present case, only one player is considered the winner who can pose the next question. Perhaps the person who receives the most “yes” responses should be deemed the winner, but that is not the situation here. A single player will try to narrow things down in a rational fashion. When there are multiple competing players, a player improves his chances over competitors by making a reasonable guess at the final answer after the possibilities have been somewhat narrowed, even while the probability of success remains less than 50%.
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