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Re:33 Questions by Houshalter on Sunday November 24, 2013 @02:33PM (#6790737)
Those are bad examples because those questions don't split the population in two. Very few people are non-practicing Catholics with exactly three children. If you want to limit the number of questions to just 33 then you have to choose your questions very carefully.
Re:33 Questions by Serplat on Sunday November 24, 2013 @02:53PM (#6790823)
I think you misunderstood. powrtoch proposed having a set of questions in which each individual question is itself very complicated. For example, being a non-practicing Catholic with exactly three children is only one small facet to a single question. By or'ing a bunch of really specific questions together you can come very close to getting exactly 50% of the population to answer yes to a single question.
Re:33 Questions by mds on Sunday November 24, 2013 @03:14PM (#6790909)
That's kinda cheating though isn't it? Like chaining a dozen statements on one line with semicolons and going, "look I can write that program in one line!"
Re:33 Questions by mcintyre1994 on Sunday November 24, 2013 @03:28PM (#6790961)
That depends what constraints you choose to define on the problem - if they need to be knowable, memorable,... then yes probably. Anyway, sz4kerto has a good comment about using a Karnaugh map which might help see how this works - it's a lot cleverer than just chaining things randomly - but does break a lot of hypothetical arbritary restrictions.
Re:33 Questions by jld on Sunday November 24, 2013 @02:51PM (#6790809)
The example was one question with a bunch of OR operators that when combined, would equal exactly 50%.