101–110 of 169 posts
If the goal is to have questions which can be answered only with yes or no. I don't think asking for location of the person is good thing, because there would be so many questions as there is locations. "Do you live in China, India, The United States, Indonesia, Brazil or Pakistan?" is not good question.
"Were you born east or west of longitude X" (where X is a longitude that would split the population roughly in half).
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…
Not only that: The first question must divide the population in 2; the second question must divide each of the 2 subsets produced by the first question in 2; and the third has to perfectly divide the 4 subsets produced by the second... And this independently of the order in which you make the questions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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
What if you weren't born in a city? The USA seems to give "city status" to many places, but not all countries follow this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would work if people birthdays were uniformly distributed among the dates. But that's not the case. (Most people born 100 years ago are now dead.)
As long as you split the distribution uniformly into categories with the same number of people, it doesn't matter that it's not uniform by date.
There is no doubt that you can uniquely identify the world population with 33 bits, so I guess the problem is to do it with questions people can answer themself.
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…
Sure, but if you ask "do you consider yourself classically male" and "do you consider yourself classically female", you'll get the vast majority of people, so you can still eliminate large swaths of population with either of these.
Picking discrete questions like this is equivalent to building a decision tree for humanity. This is actually something that could be approached as an engineering problem (and there are mechanisms for optimizing decision trees).
The problem still remains in the face of both the technological capabilities of decision trees, and practical implementations like Hunch.com, that decision trees are reductive and discrete. Reality is neither discrete nor reductive.
It may very well be the case that there is a set of questions that could uniquely identify humans, but the insight that could be drawn from those questions might be essentially pointless.
For example:
* Were you born in the northern hemisphere?
* Were you born on an even numbered year in the Gregorian calendar?
* Is the country of your birth governed through a representative system?
I ask because questions like number of siblings, favorite movie, etc. would change over time.
I don't think this problem is solvable in any elegant form, but it is solvable. You'll just end up with massively conjunctive questions that you can't even hold in your head at once, like "27: Are you a non-practicing Catholic with exactly three children, or an asian owner of a minivan produced between 1998 and 2004 that isn't green, or a licensed boat mechanic with astigmatism, or..." and so on for the next 6 pages.…