I’m Old, Part XLI: Trolling Creative People | Hacker News Reader

I’m Old, Part XLI: Trolling Creative People

plinth.org

74 pointsdouche28 comments

How to cheat at 20 questions: instead of picking a single thing to be the answer, keep a set of things in mind. As you answer the yes-or-no questions, prune the set so everything in it still satisfies all the questions. If your set has more than one element at the end, pick an answer nobody guessed.

I thought of this when my kids were little but don't think I ever pulled it on them.

If you want to go to the quantum physics end of things, play the classic game, with a twist. The "it" person leaves the room while everyone else decides on the object. Instead however, they agree that no one will have any idea of what the object actually is, and they are free to answer the questions however they want, but with the following rule: each answer must remain consistent with all previous answers.

So everyone has their own object ?

I like the idea of everyone having the set of all objects and then as each person is asked, not being allowed to contradict any other answer, until everyone has the same object.

It's even more bizarre... no one has an object at all. You essentially build up the object from a set of properties defined by asking yes or no questions, the answers to which must be consistent. It's actually possible that the object will only be known when the last question is asked and answered.

Hehe, I'm pretty sure my kids thought of this when they were little and pulled this trick on me. I seem to recall having the conversation more than once that not thinking of a single thing and sticking to it was cheating. :P *Which of course then meant I was the one acting like a child.

I found out the hard way that the ethics of trolling between parents and children are, um, underspecified when I went for a stretch telling them that marzipan was parmesan and parmesan was marzipan. They were nonplussed when they found out.

Hahah, that's pretty funny. Not far off from what we do with Santa Claus though, right?

With my eldest we switched colors around. Red -> Green, Green -> Blue, Blue -> Red.

The grass is blue and the sky is red.

Of course we did not let anybody else in on it and we got so used to it at some point that we'd confuse each other when unaware who we were talking to :)

How long were you able to keep it going?

Couple of months.

My mother used to pretend to control changing traffic lights... it took me a little while to figure out that she was watching the opposing the lights. It was pretty magical at the time... and she got to troll me.

Reminds me of the 'Black Magic' trick: an obscure cue or pattern that can be used to disclose privileged secrets.

Haha, reminds me of when I was a kid. I noticed that on TV shows the logo in the corner would disappear just a few moments before advertisements start. So I started getting up to grab a drink or go toilet just before the ads start. Freaked out my mom and sister a lot. I think I kept it up for at least a year before explaining it to them. I'm not sure my father figured it out, he never said anything though and he was a master troll himself.

I have two babies now, they don't stand a chance. ;)

Also, hangman. If the guesser knows you're changing your answers, you end up in a perfect information game sometimes called Schrödinger's Hangman.

That sounds like a decent programming exercise.

This is a bastardized version of a game called Danetki (in Russian) whereby one person tells the end of the story and other players must guess what the whole story was by asking Yes/No questions.

E.g. - In the middle of an undisturbed snowfield lies a man. Next to him lies a piece of cloth. What happened?

E.g. - A man wakes up in the morning, gets up from bed, looks in the mirror and then throws himself out of the window, killing himself. Again, what happened?

This sort of thing. An excellent way to pass some time on long train rides. But after a while everyone runs out of stories, so someone inevitably turns to this trolling variation and that's how the evening ends.

We call them "Minute Mysteries" where I grew up in the US... I'd guess it was brought over from Russian immigrants. I remember the ones you mentioned, along with one about someone hanging themselves on an ice brick, another about someone drawing a short straw on a hot air balloon, and I think one about a runner in baseball coming in to home.

> someone hanging themselves on an ice brick

Spoilers! The riddle is that someone is found hung on top of a water puddle and no chair.

We used to do a mind-reading trick like this: the magician takes somebody out of the room and "attunes" them - ie tells them the rules, which are .. if the magician asks if the object is something that has a specific attribute, such as being a certain colour, then its not that thing but is the next thing that the magician will ask about. then the magician comes back to the room, and the people there decide on an object. Beckon the mind reader back in and the magician points to a series of objects and the mind reader gets the correct one, every time

I know this as "black magic", and the item prior to the correct item would be black.

Next time, begin with this question: "Are we playing \"Decadence\"?"

I admire your dedication to escaping your strings.

But aren't we all always looking to escape our strings? For such is the fate of puppets.

I've played a similar game called "Psychiatrist". Everyone sits in a circle, and the "it" person in the centre and asks yes/no questions of each person in turn. Their goal is to figure out the rule everyone's following, which is : "Answer as if you are the person on your left."

Any kind of personal question becomes hilarious. What makes it hard and extra fun is that every time someone answers wrongly, the person they're answering for (or anyone else) yells out "psychiatrist!" and everyone switches places - answers to the same questions change.

This game reminds me of so many "brain teaser" questions... here are some things that, trust me, form a pattern. Guess what I'm thinking. WRONG.

Makes me think about puzzles & video games and how it's really easy and cheap to make something that's hard or unsolvable. It takes a lot of skill and iteration to get something to just hard enough but achievable that it's really fun and satisfying.

Reminds me of Mao, where the rules of the game are unspoken and you have to learn the rules by playing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_(card_game)

Taking the name of Our Great Leader in vain.

Discussing the rules.

The version of this that works for a group:

Put everyone who is playing in an order. The first three players start out in a room and have the rules explained to them. Everyone else is forbidden to come in this room. After the rules are explained, you call in the fourth player, play the game, and then explain the rules and they get to participate on the next round as the fifth player (and so on) is called in. Everybody but the last person gets to play both sides, which makes it more fun. You can change the rules, to mess with people who already know the game.

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