Twenty Questions Games Always End With Yes
Information Theory
2010-03-01 v1 Discrete Mathematics
math.IT
Abstract
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 to this issue, and prove that the average number of questions still lies between H(X) and H(X)+1.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1002.4907,
title = {Twenty Questions Games Always End With Yes},
author = {John T. Gill and William Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1002.4907},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
2 pages, 2 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory