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You have only 3 questions. If you formulate a hypothesis like "A is True, B is False and C is Random", with a naive approach you will waste much more than 3 questions just to test this single hypothesis (and statistically, it will be false, so you will need to test more).

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I think there's also the implied "or they will kill you" to encourage a non-brute-force method. While this one in particular doesn't mention any death threats, most problems of this kind do. I mean, why else limit yourself to their constraints, if not to preserve life / sanity / coffee / beer?

except that you aren't limited to falsifying a single premise with each question. remember guess who? the first thing you learned was to eliminate as much of the search space as possible with each step.

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