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33 Questions

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Re: 33 Questions

#91

Post by blauwbilgorgel »

stbullard wrote: post #41

Fun to think about, but in the real world, no question neatly divides people, even the gender one. To quote Reddit's u/tailcalled[1], the exo-software/meatspace world is even less standardized than the software world: Falsehoods programmers believe about gender: http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programm... Falsehoods programmers believe about names: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-pr…

>... 33 'Yes' or 'No' general questions that, when answered correctly, uniquely identified everyone on the planet.

I think a lot is possible with this challenge. You could compress over 8 billion yes/no questions in a single yes/no question under these rules.

And if that doesn't neatly divide people, why not let the people divide themselves through unique thought?

A 33-bit hash would probably collide too much. Yet there seems no requirement to communicate your hash back to the creator of the questionnaire with your answers. It could be a 1024-bit hash of a short story like:

  Hi I am blauwbilgorgel. I currently define myself as male.
  My internet names are ... I lived at ... I think we are
  in Time Cube. Today is Setting Orange. I declare ...
that would create a unique hash with which to uniquely identify yourself with.

Re: 33 Questions

#92

Post by dkokelley »

tehwebguy wrote: post #36

This reminds me of Akinator: http://en.akinator.com 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.

It's similar, except the questions it asks can be crafted based on previous responses.

Re: 33 Questions

#93

Post by asveikau »

stbullard wrote: post #41

Fun to think about, but in the real world, no question neatly divides people, even the gender one. To quote Reddit's u/tailcalled[1], the exo-software/meatspace world is even less standardized than the software world: Falsehoods programmers believe about gender: http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programm... Falsehoods programmers believe about names: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-pr…

Interesting lists.

I was initially confused about the first one. Then I realized that the author mentioned working on HR systems and it clicked. But for most of us who aren't building HR databases, I honestly think most professional programmers don't have to think about gender in their work nearly as much as this list suggests - the biggest thing I could come up with would be for localization, where some strings may need to be tweaked for the gender of people or inanimate objects.

Re: 33 Questions

#94

Post by brownbat »

raverbashing wrote: post #47
stbullard wrote: post #41

Fun to think about, but in the real world, no question neatly divides people, even the gender one. To quote Reddit's u/tailcalled[1], the exo-software/meatspace world is even less standardized than the software world: Falsehoods programmers believe about gender: http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programm... Falsehoods programmers believe about names: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-pr…

Yes, there's so much about these. Of course, in practice, you usually target your system to a narrow set of users at first. But yeah, if you're facebook, or work with an airline booking system, for example, you will most likely hit every single item on these lists

> you usually target your system to a narrow set of users at first [but eventually the exceptions show up]

Reminded me of the College Humor sketch about security questions: http://www.collegehumor.com/embed/6936880/security-questions...

Re: 33 Questions

#95

Post by upquark »

abentspoon wrote: post #69

It's not enough to find 33 independent questions that evenly split the world's population. An optimal, though inelegant solution to that goal might look something like this: "Is the {1..33}th bit of sha1(name : location : date of birth) 1?". Clearly you'll have tons of collisions with that solution, as you would have with any solution using 33 independent questions. To uniquely identify people, we'd either need to us…

> Clearly you'll have tons of collisions with that solution

Why?

If we assume the hash code assignment to one of the 2^32 people is uniformly random from a set of 2^160 codes, the odds of finding a collision are astronomically small (order of 2^-95 or so). Am I missing something?

Re: 33 Questions

#96

Post by jayd16 »

I bet you could make a lot of progress by dividing GPS coordinates evenly by population. Simple binary search by primary residence and then leave some space for division within a household.

Re: 33 Questions

#97

Post by raverbashing »

brownbat wrote: post #94
raverbashing wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there's so much about these. Of course, in practice, you usually target your system to a narrow set of users at first. But yeah, if you're facebook, or work with an airline booking system, for example, you will most likely hit every single item on these lists

> you usually target your system to a narrow set of users at first [but eventually the exceptions show up] Reminded me of the College Humor sketch about security questions: http://www.collegehumor.com/embed/6936880/security-questions...

"but eventually the exceptions show up"

Yes. And they will be pissed/disappointed, especially if you're preventing them of doing something (their job, for example).

Great examples on the video! What's "impossible" today is obvious tomorrow.

Re: 33 Questions

#98

Post by Zarathust »

I don't think it is possible with exactly 33 questions. It will probably require more than that. Binary numbers have the property of adding twice as many numbers +1 for every new bit. For example if you already have 7 bits and you add an 8th one, then you'll be able to represent 127 numbers with that bit off and 128 numbers with that bit on.

To properly mimic this property with yes/no questions, you will have to come up with questions that divide the whole Earth's population equally AT EVERY NEW QUESTION. Even the most obvious one, "are you (fe)male?" is slightly biased toward men (according to wikipedia). At every question that skew your 50/50, you'll have to add another question beyond 33 to catch up with this.

Re: 33 Questions

#99

Post by brownbat »

scraplab wrote: post #53
ZirconCode wrote: post #11

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

Lots of people don't know their birthday, or if they do, it was written down as 1st Jan (or another memorable date), because their parents/carer didn't know when they came to register them, if they ever registered them. There will be bias towards those memorable dates.

> Lots of people don't know...

We can go farther. People in a coma or with certain mental impairments will fall out of the system, if knowledge of any given fact is a hard requirement.

The only way this even makes sense as a thought experiment is if you have some magic biographical oracle that helps you answer the questions.

Re: 33 Questions

#100

Post by thethimble »

Zarathust wrote: post #98

I don't think it is possible with exactly 33 questions. It will probably require more than that. Binary numbers have the property of adding twice as many numbers +1 for every new bit. For example if you already have 7 bits and you add an 8th one, then you'll be able to represent 127 numbers with that bit off and 128 numbers with that bit on. To properly mimic this property with yes/no questions, you will have to come…

All questions must be independent. That's too hard. I would be surprised to find even a handful of questions that have no statistical correlation when applied to all people in the world.
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