A mostly-duplicate of /TheSkeward/will-manifold-guess-the-character-i
This market will resolve positively if anyone guesses the character I am thinking of (may be real or fictional) before the close date (a month from now). Each qualifying participant may make two guesses, in the comments. There is no limit to the total number of questions asked by Manifold collectively.
Asking "is it [character]" counts as a guess, as does asking a yes/no question to which I will reply one of "yes", "no", or "null" (which means I don't know, or the question isn't applicable, or for some other reason I'm unable to answer it yes/no).
To guess, you must be an active Manifold user and not an alt created to prey on markets where there's an advantage to having more accounts such as this one.
I won't bet in this market.
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🏅 Top traders
| # | Name | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ110 | |
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The character was the interrobang. Well done to Jim Hays for guessing that a bit faster than a binary search would have allowed.
I think an even faster success would have been possible. If traders had looked at my commenting history, you'd have seen that I use the interrobang as a part of my normal writing. (It's a pet character of mine that I think should be used more frequently. I've remapped my keyboard to make it easy to type.) The prior on this market should have assigned higher probability to characters I find interesting over completely random ones from all of unicode.
I don't think the outstanding questions below will be answered in time to inform further questions before market close, and it doesn't look like there's going to be a lot more traction from other participants either. Not sure if this is allowed, but I'd like to make my last guess conditional on the outstanding questions.
If Odd UTF-8 code point and in my last message:
Is it the interrobang?
If Even UTF-8 code point and in my last message:
Is it the Euro Sign?
If Odd UTF-8 code point and not my last message:
Is it the En Dash?
If Even UTF-8 code point and not in my last message:
Is it the Em Dash?
@JimHays Conditional questions seem fine to me, since they're just outsourcing your decision-making process to me rather than doing it in your head. I can't think of any unfair advantage you'd gain from something like this.
Anyone disagree?
@IsaacKing I would agree it's fine. The point is it's queuing up the questions in advance to improve asynchronous communication. Maybe some people were betting NO on the basis of the back-and-forth time needed to answer questions, but I consider this a clever and valid solution to that problem.
@jack Yeah, I don't think I have any obligation to help people waste time. (Nor any obligation to respond quickly, which does mean I can effectively choose how likely this market is to resolve YES. Which is one of the reasons I didn't bet.)
@IsaacKing It was the best character from the remaining options‼
Had I only one guess instead of two I would have guessed it as my first question.
I realized that the framing of trying to identify a random Unicode character, while useful initially, was not the best since the original market was to guess your character, not guess a random unicode point. Quite a few of the remaining options are very obscure, and for a decent number it was arguable as to whether they were characters in their own right. Like, had you chosen a modifier accent, I’d have exclaimed, “What‽”
@JimHays I think this is already ruled out by the previous questions. It should be on https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+2000 or one of the pages shortly after
@JimHays Ah nvm sorry, I misremembered what sort of unicode characters were still in the range because of the earlier confusion.
@jack I looked at the remaining options and picked the eight most interesting odd characters and eight most interesting even characters
@IsaacKing Is your character's UTF-8 code point an even number between U+2001 and U+2100 (inclusive)? In other words, directly wolframalphable, is it 0 mod 2? (I’m throwing a curveball since you were bored.)
[Meta comment: this is the last guess I can make. Next people need to continue to narrow down the search, optimally by using binary search (progressively halving the number ranges that remain valid). Remember we’re working in a hexadecimal system, for example, the midpoint between 0x2001 and 0x2100 is 0x2080 rather than 0x2050.]
@IsaacKing Yeah, but probably one could have predicted that to happen when the character in question was a unicode character :)
By the way, this is not an official question/guess but if I wildly speculate about the character I'd say something like https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+20A5
@IsaacKing the challenge was initally fun but once the character pun was revealed all intrigue was gone from this market
@IsaacKing yeah, I still think this is a fundamentally good concept though if you're interested in making more
@jack (Meta comment) Isn’t hex the default? ie. https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+2000
@yaboi69 Oh good point, uh... Callie's first question was "between U+0800 and U+3200" but then we seemed to be working in decimal for the following questions. I'm not sure, I guess we need to confirm with Isaac how he was interpreting our questions?
@jack Do we? If we didn’t bring this up and found the number, that’d probably be enough. (Sorry for cross-talk btw, you still have one question left so I won’t cut in again until you’re done.)
@yaboi69 Well, in a couple questions we will need to know whether to continue the binary search in decimal or in hex, right? Like we'll get a range of 100, and then the next question would be either 00-50 or 00-80.
No problem, I'll save my question for later, I'm about to go to sleep so you should use yours now.
@IsaacKing Thanks! I think that is the default interpretation so that makes sense. Ok we can continue with @yaboi69 's last question then - between 2001 and 2200
@IsaacKing Is your character's UTF-8 code point between U+2001 and U+2100 (inclusive)?
[I asked one question/guess that was repeated as a reminder by Jack, so I’m working on the assumption I still have one left, and arguably he does as well.]
@IsaacKing Thanks. To tidy and speed things up I’ll use our last 4th Q (accounting: Jack guessed 1601–2000 and under a liberal interpretation 2001–2200, while I guessed 2001–2100) – but in a new thread.