The Science Game
At the end of Wednesday’s meeting of the UMD Society of Inquiry, the local student skeptic group, I conducted a psychological experiment on those attendees who didn’t need to rush off for other appointments.
It was a variation on the game of Twenty Questions. But instead of a person or thing, I’d think of a rule or category, which the players had to guess. And instead of trying to guess directly what category I had in mind, the players would call out a specific example, and I’d tell them whether it was in the category I was thinking of. Actually, I asked them to name both the category they were thinking of, and a specific example; but I’d only tell them whether the specific example fit my category, not whether the category they were thinking of was correct.
For example, I might think of the category “types of cake”. A player might say, “the category is vegetables
, and the example is carrot
“. I would then say yes, because carrot cake is a type of cake. The next player knows that “carrot” matches the rule, and might say “orange things, and the example is red hair”. To which I’d say no, because there’s no such thing as red hair cake.
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