7 ms·
Just use: - Birthday (19~ bits) - Rough Location (remaining bits) And base the questions around those two, for example, where you born on a 1-15th, does the
by ZirconCode 13y ago
Just use:
- Birthday (19~ bits)
- Rough Location (remaining bits)
And base the questions around those two, for example, where you born on a 1-15th, does the city you were born in start with the letter's a-k. This part would be an exercise in statistics, I would think.
edit: And one bit for if you were the first to be born of two identical twins =p
- gkoberger 13y agoTriplets?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bnegreve 13y agoThat would work if people birthdays were uniformly distributed among the dates. But that's not the case. (Most people born 100 years ago are now dead.)
- ronaldx 13y agoAs long as you split the distribution uniformly into categories with the same number of people, it doesn't matter that it's not uniform by date.
- bnegreve 13y agoYes, except that you cannot expect people to be able to answer this "question" anymore. There is no doubt that you can uniquely identify the world population with 33 bits, so I guess the problem is to do it with questions people can answer themself.
- scraplab 13y agoLots of people don't know their birthday, or if they do, it was written down as 1st Jan (or another memorable date), because their parents/carer didn't know when they came to register them, if they ever registered them. There will be bias towards those memorable dates.
- brownbat 13y ago> Lots of people don't know... We can go farther. People in a coma or with certain mental impairments will fall out of the system, if knowledge of any given fact is a hard requirement. The only way this even makes sense as a thought experiment is if you have some magic biographical oracle that helps you answer the questions.
- xauronx 13y ago"Lots of people don't know their birthday" Really? I've never met a single person who didn't. I guess "lots" in the terms of thousands could be plausible, vs "lots" in the terms of "a high percentage".
- rmc 13y agoWhat if you weren't born in a city? The USA seems to give "city status" to many places, but not all countries follow this.