The first
question is actually
quaternary :
Its
answer could indeed be either "
animal", "
vegetal" or "
mineral" but also "
neither" as, if I want the others
players to guess something which nature is either "
lexical" or "
boolean", or "
numerical" (hence turning the
game into a "
Mystery Number" game), but also "
historical", a "
quote", "
synthetic"...
This raises the total
amount of
possible answers to 2097152 which is 4 x 2^19 (2^21 would be shorter but a bit obfuscated).
Now, if we deal with
common nouns, let's take the
Oxford English dictionary which contains 231,100
entries in its 1989
Edition.
Of course, we may also want to
guess some
proper noun which enlarge this
lexical set to a
virtually unlimited
cardinal.
Let's
analyze which kind of
binary (
yes/
no) question may be asked :
- Nature : Material / immaterial
- Nature : Living / Inanimate
- Nature : Natural / Artificial
Suppose one
dichotomically got through Material / Living / Articial, we may then direct our following questions toward something related to
genetic engineering (
clone (
Dolly ?),
Monsanto's stuff...)
But now, if the answer to the first question had been "Immaterial", it might have been a good idea not to continue with the proposed 2nd question (Except if you want to make the
players guess something which is related to something metaphysical, in which case, the obvious 2nd question would have been : "Is the answer related to
metaphysics ?")...
That's why,
Ariels, though I really liked your answer, I don't consider it
correct as I consider the
number of possible questions should rather be
over 2^1 million (at least) hence, leading us to a number of 2^(1 million of millions) possibilities which is IMHO quite a lot before the game becomes
boring.
UPDATE: I just visited the http://www.20q.net web site which
URL was given in the
Twenty Questions node.
Funny : for
/dev/null it suggested me
The Holy Spirit, then
silence which was quite close in the latter case.