Guess who game strategy

Even with the uneven distribution for each of the characteristics gender, earrings, hats, etc. They are not immediately obvious, but someone committed to efficient search algorithms and game theory can find them. Here are two of them:. This first question uses a specific type of dichotomic search, a binary search. If you are searching for a particular item and you have all the possible items in some kind of ordered list, you can use a binary search. You start by looking at the middle of the list to see if the item is less than or greater than the middle; you can then eliminate the half of the items on the other side of the middle.

You next look at the middle of the list that remains, eliminate half of those items, and then continue in this manner until you have reduced the number to one. The common example of a binary search is looking for a key in an ordered array that matches a particular value.

Suppose you have an array of items like Guess Who? Suppose also you want to find the key in the array of one of the names like Susan. Let me walk you through some JavaScript code that conducts this binary search. My descriptions come after each code block. Any question will split the remaining candidates into two groups.

Since each candidate that has yet to be ruled out is equally likely, we can consider any two questions equivalent if the smaller of the groups they each identify contain the same number of candidates.

Suppose we have n candidates remaining. Since we are asking a question, we must have that n is greater than 1 and since we can automatically rule out our own character we also know that n can be at most We can now define a question by the size of the smaller of the two groups that it splits the candidates into.

We will call this number m. We will therefore assume m is at least 1. If you asked for just white hair you would likely only eliminate five people. Asking the compound question allows you to eliminate ten people or fourteen people. The best compound question to ask as your first question might be to ask if they have a man-made item on their face glasses, hats, jewelry and bows. This question is a good first question because you will either eliminate eleven or thirteen people with the first question.

Below is a breakdown of how to use this strategy. Do you have any memories of the game Guess Who? Can you think of an even better strategy in order to beat Guess Who in fewer turns? Share your thoughts in the comments section. If you would like to buy Guess Who to try out these strategies for yourself, you can find many different versions of the game on Amazon.

I agree that using letters and combined questions are not in the spirit of Guess Who. Now I am going to try and ask about the man-made items, and if they have a big nose. Is it worth it to ask if they are male or female? If their character is a female though it will help a lot as you will immediately eliminate a large majority of the characters. Early in the game asking male or female is a very high risk reward question. Statistically you are best off trying to ask a question that will eliminate close to half of the characters no matter if you receive a yes or a no.

If you consistently do this you can win within around six questions no matter what you ask. If you choose to ask questions that have more characters that correspond to one of the answers you have the possibility to get rid of a lot of characters quickly, but you have a better chance of only being able to get rid of a few characters.

Board Games Game Strategies. Is your person black? Is your person a child? Beards — Four characters have a beard. Big Nose — Six of the characters have a big nose.

Blue Eyes — Five characters have blue eyes. Bushy Eyebrows — Five characters have bushy eyebrows. Child — One character is a child Anita. Glasses — Five characters wear glasses. Hair Color — All hair colors except for brown have five characters that share the same color.

With younger children and those who have never played Guess Who? That way, you can talk through your decisions and strategies, e. Question formation. Describing salient features; subjective vs. If you have a child who often communicates by pointing or uses a lot of non-specific vocabulary like that, this , or thing , playing Guess Who?

Since players sit facing each other, your child will not be able to communicate with you by pointing at the pictures on his or her board. Then you can re-shuffle the cards and sort them according to another feature like eye color, baldness, gender, facial hair, glasses, hats, etc. A variation I often use with children who are working on descriptive vocabulary is to draw pairs of cards from the deck and take turns describing ways they are the same or different.

Guess Who is available in a number of different varieties, including classic, stand-up, mix-and-match, and travel size; there are also Disney and Star Wars editions.