31–40 of 169 posts
"Do you live in China, India, The United States, Indonesia, Brazil or Pakistan?" is not good question.
In short, you can draw categories to include or exclude as precise a number as you like, you just have to be willing to draw really, really complicated boundaries.
This is a completely wrong way to approach the problem. Because the questions should all divide the population into two parts the questions should be 'matched' to each other. This approach is a bit like doing a PCA by figuring out one component, then the other, then the rest...
One way to solve this problem is to have a lot of yes/no questions (like a big Karnaugh-table), then everybody would have a long bitstring as his unique ID. Now you need to compress that bitstring -- like the minimization of the Karnaugh-table.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map
-- you need to generalize this for N number of questions (which can be done), then you'd have 33 complex questions like 'is it true that (you live in NA AND you are male) OR (you live in Canada AND you are white AND ) .. and so on and on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Northern Hemisphere has roughly 90% of the population[1]. That is far from 50% what we should be looking for. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Hemisphere
Are you born above or below the tropic of cancer then: replace with whatever latitude separates humans into equal groups.
It's a little spammy nowadays, but it's had enough input that it seems pretty amazingly accurate at "guessing" what / who you are thinking of in ~ 25 questions.
Just use: - Birthday (19~ bits) - Rough Location (remaining bits) And base the questions around those two, for example, where you born on a 1-15th, does the city you were born in start with the letter's a-k. This part would be an exercise in statistics, I would think. edit: And one bit for if you were the first to be born of two identical twins =p
Triplets?
Some hard problems :- 1. Distinguish twins 2. Using characters in names as some like Chinese use non-ascii names.
With 40 or 45, we could relax that a bit and use questions that are actually meaningful. Two people who are within a few bits of each other would actually be similar in ways we care about, unlike two people who are similar because their transliterated last names both appear in the last half of the alphabet.