Optimal guessing in Guess Who

Ben O Neill*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Are you Richard? Are you Anne? We look at the strategic problem in the children s guessing game Guess Who, which is a form of zero-sum symmetric game with perfect information. We discuss some preliminary strategic insights and formally derive an optimal strategy and win-probabilities for the game. We discuss the first-mover advantage in the game and other strategic aspects coming out of the optimal strategy. While the paper is based on the popular children s game, our analysis generalises the actual game by allowing any initial game state with an arbitrarily large number of starting characters.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article numbere0247361
    JournalPLoS ONE
    Volume16
    Issue number3
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Mar 2021

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