Twenty Questions Games Always End With Yes

Discussion of Twenty Questions Problem

Discuss several tricks for solving twenty question problems which in this paper is depicted as a guessing game. Player tries to find a ball in twenty boxes by asking as few questions as possible, and these questions are answered by only "Yes" or "No". With the discussion, demonstration of source coding methods is the main concern.

Twenty (simple) questions

A basic combinatorial interpretation of Shannon's entropy function is via the "20 questions" game. This cooperative game is played by two players, Alice and Bob: Alice picks a distribution $π$ over the numbers $\{1,\ldots,n\}$, and announces it to Bob. She then chooses a number $x$ according to $π$, and Bob attempts to identify $x$ using as few Yes/No queries as possible, on average. An optimal strategy for the "20 questions" game is given by a Huffman code for $π$: Bob's questions reveal the codeword for $x$ bit by bit. This strategy finds $x$ using fewer than $H(π)+1$ questions on average. H…

隐私与分辨率的权衡：自适应噪声二十问题估计

Privacy-Resolution Tradeoff for Adaptive Noisy Twenty Questions Estimation

本文提出一种两阶段隐私查询方法，研究自适应噪声二十问题估计中隐私与分辨率的权衡，并在无噪声情况下优于现有方法。

Reducing Guesswork via an Unreliable Oracle

Alice holds an random variable $X$, and Bob is trying to guess its value by asking questions of the form "is $X=x$?". Alice answers truthfully and the game terminates once Bob guesses correctly. Before the game begins, Bob is allowed to reach out to an oracle, Carole, and ask her any yes/no question, i.e., a question of the form "is $X\in A$?". Carole is known to lie with a given probability $p$. What should Bob ask Carole if he would like to minimize his expected guessing time? When Carole is always truthful ($p=0$), it is not difficult to check that Bob should order the symbol probabilities …