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.)
