A boring solution:
Question n. Consider the number of your birth out of all people currently alive. When you divide by 2^n and take the remainder, is it odd?
33 Questions
131–140 of 169 posts
Re: 33 Questions
#132I think first you have to show a question exists that effectively separates identical twins before you spend much time working on broad questions like gender and geography.
Maybe something like "Do you have more older siblings than younger siblings?" would work. One twin has to be born before the other. That question has some problems, but I feel like it could serve as the basis for a more specific question that would define how an only child or middle child would answer without introducing much bias. It would also have to define how half-siblings are counted and probably some other thi…
So you are going to burn one entire question that is entirely worthless for the vast majority of Chinese that have been born recently?
Re: 33 Questions
#133This is a really cool concept, but one that is totally impossible. In the actual world, few things are truly independent. Even if you could find 33 binary questions that did not correlate with each other at all, you still run the risk of having multiple people yield the same 33 answers.
Just because two things aren't statistically linked does not mean that they will never overlap.
Re: 33 Questions
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you're one of a set of twins/triplets/etc.
append datetime string of birth. Boom problem solved.
What if the twins are delivered via Caesarean, with the exact same datetime recorded? Including datetime (even as a string) also includes the aforementioned falsehoods about time.
Re: 33 Questions
#135An easy way to construct the questions is to ask for increasingly precise time and location of birth.
There will be corner cases, but then so does asking if someone is male.
Re: 33 Questions
#136Fun 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…
I'd suggest, "Do you self-identify as female?" There are slightly more women than men, so your bifercation is "female" and male/intersex/genderqueer. I'd suggest that currently intersex and genderqueer people are currently a small enough population that it would be close to 51/49 other to self-identified woman ratio.
Re: 33 Questions
#137This project assumes we can know things that are not really knowable for everyone. It starts with gender and birthplace, both tricky questions in some situations. So maybe we get to assume we have some oracle that helps us simplify the hard questions. At that stage, it's easy. Begin with, "Assume we build a list of people sorted by time of birth (with some arbitrary tiebreakers, like proximity of birthplace to Barbad…
I had come up with something similar:
Question 1: Are you north of an east-west line that perfectly divides the population in half?
(proceed to continue to divide each section in half.)
Of course, determining the position of those lines is damn near impossible. And as soon as someone hops on a plane, the whole thing comes crashing down.
Re: 33 Questions
#138I 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.…
Sounds like a premise for a dystopian sci-fi story: a future where every identity is exactly planned, where everyone's life is determine by ... 33 bits. Donald Sutherland can be the benevolent ruler that tells the protagonist how the unbridled greed of the 21st century brought us here (Hollywood adaptation can add an ironic anti-consumerist twist). Perhaps this could be a retro sci-fi a la "Brazil", with each person…
Your mistake was posting this here, and not on Reddit.
Re: 33 Questions
#139Even if the questions were perfect (each question splitting the population in two exact halves, and all questions totally independent from each other) and therefore the algorithm would give each person a perfectly random number, the birthday paradox [1] tells us that even for just square(2^33)=~ 93k people we would have 50% probability of having a collision. To work we would need more bits. (Either that or create que…
No: the linked article requires that further questions split the previous groups each in half. The first question must split the group in half, the second question must split those two groups in half, and so on. When we hit the last bit, the final question is splitting groups of 2 people into the last bit, and each person has been assigned a unique number.
In this manner, 33 bits is enough, and the birthday problem is avoided. The page mentions all this.
Re: 33 Questions
#140First 33 bits of SHA512(your DNA) First 33 bits of SHA512(your 3D GPS location)
As someone else mentions, this doesn't work, as the birthday problem[1] applies here.
You need to ensure collisions won't happen; SHA512 does not to that. (The probability of a collision in 512 bits is near impossible; in 33 bits, much less so.)