Twenty questions

Twenty questions is a two-person or multi-person guessing game.
One person thinks of an object, and says whether it is "animal" (including humans), vegetable, or mineral. The guesser or guessers must determine what this object is, by sequentially asking 20 yes-or-no questions about the object, which are answered either "yes" or "no". For example: "is it a person?", "is it someone I know?" ...

If the guessers manages to work out what the object is after twenty questions, then they win. Otherwise, the persn who thought of the object wins, and reveals what the object was. The basic strategy for the guesser maximizes the elimination of possibilities at each question. This typically involves asking very broad questions initially, such as "Are they male or female?", and asking very narrow questions towards the end, such as "Is she a character in Star Trek?"

External link

• 20Q.net (http://www.20q.net/) - Artificial intelligence version of Twenty Questions. "Everything that it knows and all questions that it asks were entered by people playing the Game."