Programmer Humor

What you want is a distribution-aware contextual binary search. With whatever information you have (appearance, personality, vocabulary, etc), you can come up with a probability distribution in the space of possible ages and start your guess with the value at the 50th percentile. Then depending on whether the true age is higher or lower, your next guess will be either the 25th or 75th percentile. Rinse and repeat.

In reality, the way most people intuitively do agree guessing is already an approximation of this procedure.

My partner is non-binary, so this search wouldn't work on them.

Yes, people some times live up to 120 years. You should start at 60.

Yes, do it in reverse. Ask her if she's 25 first, then if she's 50

There's no right answer to that question. The only winning move is not to play.

What, and then go 37.5? 24 and 48 are right there.

Abbott: “So say you’re 40 and you like a girl that’s 10. Well you’re really too old for her because you’re 4x her age. So let’s say you wait 5years. Now you’re 45 and she’s 15, so you’re only 3x as old as her, but that’s still a bit much, so you wait another 15years and now you’re 60 and she’s 30. Only half your age now.

How long do you have to wait till you’re both the same age?”

Costello: “Well 4 then 3 then 2… at this rate she’d better be willing to wait for me too.”

Abbott: “what do you mean?”

Costello: “Going like this, eventually she’ll be older than me and she better wait for me to catch up.”

Abbott: “Why would she wait for you?”

Costello: “WELL I WAITED FOR HER!”

If she is 101 binary search will fail. Stay woke.

Gotta follow Price is Right rules. Closest without going over.

If she is not 64 then she is 32.

If she is not 32 then she is 16.

overthere.sit(self)

the mistake was assuming the upper limit ended at 100

Obviously you should use an exponential search, assuming you don't know the age of the oldest human.

lol I just realized that everytime I play guessing numbers I do this

What now. "Don't ask a girl her age" but if a girl asks her own age it's also dangerous?

binary search still works fine, you just need a function probability then you cut at the median, and then rucurse into the slices

Oooh.