What should have been the last puzzle in Le Monde competition turned out to be an anticlimactic fizzle on how many yes-no questions are needed to identify an integer between 1 and 1025=2¹⁰+1 and an extension to replies possibly being lies…
What is much more exciting is that voting puzzle #1021 got cancelled because the authors of this puzzle thought the cascading majority rule would produce the optimal solution and it does not! (As exhibited by my R code.) So here is an open problem to ponder about! (And another puzzle in the pipeline to complete the competition.)
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This entry was posted on October 23, 2017 at 12:17 am and is filed under Books, Kids with tags competition, Le Monde, majority rule, mathematical puzzle, open problem, voting paradox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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October 25, 2017 at 1:59 pm
Right. Not terribly exciting this question! A typical one would have been: how many people attended (at least one answer) this contest?
October 24, 2017 at 9:24 pm
Le Monde added a final question to separate ex-aequos, which is not a mathematical question: what are your favourite puzzles [from 1001 to 1026]? And what are the favourite questions among the players? Not mathematical and hardly aesthetical.