BEST Guess Who Strategy- 96% WIN record using MATH

character girl no mmm your person max this is the board game guess who game cards did not actually talk it was created in the early 80s and it was probably my favorite game that plays a kid just because the rules are so simple now each at different guessing strategies as kids but now that I see no bunch of math classes dealing with probabilities I wondered if there was a way to just totally dominate every day so I thought about it a bunch probably more than I should have but it turns out there is a super simple guessing strategy that is perfectly legal that theoretically will win you more than 96 percent of your competitive guess-who games I tried it out on a bunch of people and it absolutely works since I've been documenting the past two weeks in my life and instead of just giving you guys the answer I want to share in the process of discovery because I feel like most the times that's the coolest part I'm running about 20 minutes late but I am packing right now to take an airplane ride to visit someone I haven't seen in 18 years his name is mr. Malloy and he was my high school statistics teacher basically I think I figured out a cure guest to strategy but I want to pick his brain about there's a quick reminder in guess who you each draw a card and that's your character then for example you can start by asking does your person wear glasses and if they say no then you would flip down all the people wearing glasses then you take turns asking yes or no questions and the first person to narrow it down to one wins I think the biggest strategic question is whether it's better to ask broad or narrow questions for example there's five people with hats so a narrow question would be does your person have a hat now there's about a 20% chance they do and if you're right you've narrowed it down to five and practically want on the other hand if you ask you a broad question that applies to say 10 people there's a greater chance to answer over the yes about forty percent but because it was more pride you're still left with ten people to guess from as opposed or only five so my right is here but while I'm traveling trying Jacob which of the two strategies is better I'll give you again one is definitely way better than the other and the difference is the key to sort of unlocking the super killer strategy and I'll just say I've had literally hundreds of teachers over the past thirty years and teachers don't make a difference awesome teachers make a difference the guy we're about to meet is one of four or five teachers that have had more of an effect on shaping me into the person I am today than all of the rest of them combined those awesome teachers have their teaching style but I think the common friends like it is all that they cared about me as a person and they're passionate about the subject they were teaching was contagious you'll see that a minute with mr. Malloy that's why whenever a teacher asks me for like Skype with their classroom I always try to find time to make it happen mainly as I eat this bump to that teacher for caring enough to do something more than just reading from a textbook oh man thanks I have not seen mr. Malloy in 18 years and he is in this classroom I'm like scared so there's 24 characters okay so here it is I mentioned two strategies earlier one was a more narrow guessing and one was more broad now it's find it useful in cases like this where the answer is it totally clear I sort of look at the extremes does your person name rhyme with growl friend no so serious question is so narrow it only applies to one person is your person african-american yes faithfully we've evolved but in Newton Bradley's defense it was the early 80s and casual racism was still acceptable is he with the super narrow guessing strategy one out of twenty four times you can actually get it right on the first guess but equally likely is that you don't get it right until your final and 24th guess and since it really has an equal chance of being only one of those numbers on average it will take 12 guesses to win now let's look at the other extreme with a really broad question so the broadest question would apply to exactly half of the characters the matter of the answer is yes or no you knock down half starting with 24 then it goes to 12 then to 6 and then to three and then to either two or one and then your final gasp so in this case you would always win in five or six moves so any other combination of narrow versus broad questions including the ten and five person questions I mentioned before would just fall somewhere in between this gives you a huge advantage because the game is intentionally designed to ask narrow questions so prepare to have your mind blown but every single attribute and guess who applies to exactly five people so five people have glasses five have moustaches five people have red hair five have hats blue eyes five or women five appalled blond hair black hair white hair exactly five people even have big noses and rosy cheeks so given that every attribute applies to only five people how can you possibly ask question that applies to exactly half of them there's several different ways to do it but one idea is to ask a question like does your person have white hair or red hair or glasses now this is perfectly legal since the rules state you just have to ask a yes-or-no question then on your next turn you just pick some combination of attributes that applies to half the remaining people another idea would be does your person's name start with the letters a through L know it sounds right okay good I have this approval and now for the hard part I want to know what is the true probability of me winning with this strategy right I want to know when I go in the battle against my six-year-old nephew right how confident can I be then I'm gonna win right can you do that yeah okay yes this thing let's talk about it well here's an example of a random event happening there's 256 little bb's in here okay and when they drop through the hopper they always make this normal curve it's a random process but you do know that the group will always look like it it's fascinating and what's also fascinating is that anytime you have a bell curve like this in real life it always breaks down to the percentages you see here for each standard deviation away from the average in the middle so for example every time you flip that card over about 38% of the bb's will always fall into the chute and so even though your strategy is better than your opponents sometimes you'll win so knowing the from the mean and the standard deviation and the normal curve compilations we can calculate how often feel we need in treatment okay and how can you win in seven loops say okay and then if you multiply those probabilities together using the multiplication rule you'll actually get a little square here and that says what's the probability of that game happening and you can fill in this whole grid and know all the probabilities of certain game occurring and if you add these up we have 99% of all the outcomes of the games fourteen percent of the time and you got that by just saying two plus two plus two plus two plus six studies and sixty-three percent of time this is super cool because these percentages for a bell curve match up with exactly what our PV showed us earlier in real life okay so just to make sure I got this for our hypothetical situation here there is a 38 percent chance my opponent will guess their person in six moves yep now I'm a little better so there's a 38 percent chance that I will guess my person in five minutes so the chance of having that game happened where I win in five guesses versus his six guesses is 15 percent and that's because 38 percent times 38 percent yep you just multiply it's just like a rectangular area it's just like old time it's we multiply all this yeah just like back in the day on it multiply now one of the things I remember from your class is that I can't just like play three games and assume that that's going to be statistically valid right yes how many games gets to do I need to play to be confident that I have the right distribution you would have to place 625 games that's a big number guess who that is a lot of yeah so I have 625 games to go but at the end of that my goal is to find the true bell curve for the standard strategy and the true bell curve for my tricky strategy and then at that point I can populate this chart and then I can add up the pink numbers right so that means if I sit down and play my five-year-old nephew and guess who I'll be like there's a 90% chance I win I'm gonna destroy the underground gasps ooh gambling market in Vegas with one YouTube video so it was gonna take a while to finish 625 games so I called up my super smart buddy Chad who you might recognize from when we built the annoying co-worker countdown NES act oh gosh and with Chad's big brain and a computer program he wrote emulating the standard guessing strategy after a thousand games we discovered the typical guess who player will take about seven guesses with the standard deviation of about two when you plug that into mr. Maloy chart we find that the improved guessing strategy will win 80% of the time now the beginning this video I promised you would win 96 percent of your destiny games and the key to get there is just to play first one to five wins guess who actually calls this championship mode and they even provide eggs for you to keep track of the person one with five the reason this increases your chance so much is because of what's called the law of large numbers basically the more games you play there's a aggression to the meat or a convergence to the predictive probability so this dash line is your predicted winning percentage but to win over all you just need to win more games than you lose so you want to be above the dried spaghetti line at 50% now this spot here is just pizza grease and has no meaning so you might get unlucky and lose the first game but then you win the second game now this frozen chicken nugget will represent the running average and right now it's right in the middle but let's say you get unlucky and lose the third game if the match was over now you would lose since the nugget is below the spaghetti but the law of large numbers states that over time the chicken nugget will migrate towards the dashed line and then just stay there after a while you can see that even if your opponent goes on a hot streak the nugget doesn't move much and you can pretty much guarantee victory since there's no way it will dip back down below the spaghetti this is exactly why biggest casinos have no windows or clocks they have a small statistical advantage so the longer you stay there the more they are guaranteed to come out ahead and it's also why if LeBron Jake ever challenges you to a game of one-on-one do not play best two out of three play one game first point wins if possible but you know what I like a lot more than children's board games knowledge ok so sorry this video was so long but it was all good stuff and I couldn't bear to cut any of it so thank you for making it this far now I'm going to leave you it's how I gently beat mr. Maloy it only one guess but before I do I wanted to give a heartfelt thank you to lynda.com the theme of this video is teaching and learning so true story about five years ago I stumbled upon a website called lynda.com which has super high quality video tutorials that's how I learned to edit these videos in Premiere Pro it's how you learn Photoshop and After Effects it's how we learn to actually use my DSLR it's our lens set up the lighting and the audio for these videos i took some advanced courses on excel i even took a course to learn how to negotiate like a pro the point is if you want to learn new skill or just get way better at something you are you in the least amount of time and that's your own pace I've never found anything that comes even close to it and now the coolest part is if you want to become a smarter human being and support me in making teacher videos you can do both just by trying it out for free for 10 days just use the link in the description or go to lynda.com slash mark rover so I wanted to thank Linda comm and of course to thank you guys for actually watching does your person do they have a like a paid account for farmersonly.com you've known that dating site she does I gave it away I gave way to clues for what I think we just leave it at that ketchup

Channel: Mark Rober

Views: 11,052,264

Rating: 4.7138581 out of 5

Keywords: guess who, board game, strategy, win guess who, best strategy for guess who, mark rober, skin a watermelon, nasa, statistics, proabilities, Monopoly (Game), watermelon smoothie, atm pin code hack, egg drop experiment, pinewood derby

Id: FRlbNOno5VA

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/DimplesMcGee]

That guy is insanely irritating.

Also if you asked "Does your guy have white hair, glasses, or rosy cheeks" I would accuse you of cheating.

[u/crocodileheart]

Read title. Interest piqued. Click link. Get irritated by guy after 30 seconds. Look at video length. Close window.

[u/musecorn]

In contrast to all the other people in this thread, I found this video incredibly interesting, and the guy intelligent and well-spoken. He takes a simple children's game, which most people wouldn't think twice about, and turns it on its head by applying statistics to find the best strategy. I love that kind of shit.

I liked the video. I wish it was longer, didn't find him annoying. He seems very passionate for what he's interested in, and in educating a general audience.

[u/BordomBeThyName]

Man, you guys are picky. I thought this video was awesome.

[u/SummonWurm]

DOES HE LOOK LIKE A BITCH?

[u/Lord_Zubat]

This is probably the most useless talent that I've ever learned. Bravo, OP.

[u/thebedshow]

Those questions would never fly in guess who. They may be technically usable, but I would drop a big fuck you if anyone tried that bullshit.

[u/Natten]

Why do so many videos have a cut every 5 secs?

[u/Kl3rik]

So basically ask 3 questions at a time because it's technically within the rules.

How to have no one play Guess Who with you again 96% of the time.