Related papers: Twenty (simple) questions

`Twenty questions' is a guessing game played by two players: Bob thinks of an integer between $1$ and $n$, and Alice's goal is to recover it using a minimal number of Yes/No questions. Shannon's entropy has a natural interpretation in this…

In the distributional Twenty Questions game, Bob chooses a number $x$ from $1$ to $n$ according to a distribution $\mu$, and Alice (who knows $\mu$) attempts to identify $x$ using Yes/No questions, which Bob answers truthfully. Her goal is…

Huffman coding is often presented as the optimal solution to Twenty Questions. However, a caveat is that Twenty Questions games always end with a reply of "Yes," whereas Huffman codewords need not obey this constraint. We bring resolution…

In a recently introduced coset guessing game, Alice plays against Bob and Charlie, aiming to meet a joint winning condition. Bob and Charlie can only communicate before the game starts to devise a joint strategy. The game we consider begins…

We consider a simple streaming game between two players Alice and Bob, which we call the mirror game. In this game, Alice and Bob take turns saying numbers belonging to the set $\{1, 2, \dots,2N\}$. A player loses if they repeat a number…

Efficient optimal prefix coding has long been accomplished via the Huffman algorithm. However, there is still room for improvement and exploration regarding variants of the Huffman problem. Length-limited Huffman coding, useful for many…

In this paper we study interactive "one-shot" analogues of the classical Slepian-Wolf theorem. Alice receives a value of a random variable $X$, Bob receives a value of another random variable $Y$ that is jointly distributed with $X$.…

Huffman coding is well known to be useful in certain decision problems involving minimizing the average number of (freely chosen) queries to determine an unknown random variable. However, in problems where the queries are more constrained,…

In Problem #1542 of Mathematics Magazine, Grossman and Turett define the Cantor game. In his 2007 Mathematics Magazine article about the Cantor game, Matt Baker proves several results and poses three challenging questions about it: Do there…

This paper is on developing some computer-assisted proof methods involving non-classical inequalities for Shannon entropy. Two areas of the applications of information inequalities are studied: Secret sharing schemes and hat guessing games.…

The 20 Questions (Q20) game is a well known game which encourages deductive reasoning and creativity. In the game, the answerer first thinks of an object such as a famous person or a kind of animal. Then the questioner tries to guess the…

We consider the problem of 20 questions with noise for multiple players under the minimum entropy criterion in the setting of stochastic search, with application to target localization. Each player yields a noisy response to a binary query…

In this work, we consider "decision" variants of a monogamy-of-entanglement game by Tomamichel, Fehr, Kaniewski, and Wehner [New Journal of Physics '13]. In its original "search" variant, Alice prepares a (possibly entangled) state on…

We describe and develop a close relationship between two problems that have customarily been regarded as distinct: that of maximizing entropy, and that of minimizing worst-case expected loss. Using a formulation grounded in the equilibrium…

This paper proposes a novel entropy encoding technique for lossless data compression. Representing a message string by its lexicographic index in the permutations of its symbols results in a compressed version matching Shannon entropy of…

Alice and Bob take turns (with Alice playing first) in declaring numbers from the set $[1,2N]$. If a player declares a number that was previously declared, that player looses and the other player wins. If all numbers are declared without…

In this paper, we consider zero-sum repeated games in which the maximizer is restricted to strategies requiring no more than a limited amount of randomness. Particularly, we analyze the maxmin payoff of the maximizer in two models: the…

We prove an explicit upper bound on the amount of entanglement required by any strategy in a two-player cooperative game with classical questions and quantum answers. Specifically, we show that every strategy for a game with n-bit questions…

We completely classify winning strategies in the Ideal Chomp Game played on $\bar{K}$-algebras R of rank at most 6. In this two-player combinatorial game, players alternately add generators to build an ideal inside a given ring R, with the…

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…