This gives you a great clue into some of the questions you need to narrow down different demographics as rapidly as possible. However, I have no ideas about how to bring that down to the individual level.
For example: if you are one of the 13 people without access to clean water - we know your are one of 780 million people, and you are very likely in Africa (355 million), India (206 million), Asia (210 million) or Latin America (42 million) or one of 10 million in the remaining countries.
So "Do you have access to clean water?" rapidly narrows down the world, but where do you go next? Do you live in north America? a no-yes answer narrows the subject from one in 7.13 billion to one in 1.7 million (http://win-water.org/reports/RCAP_full_final.pdf) with two questions. If not then we have somebody who is one of 8.3 million living in Europe, Russia or Australia. So either way we have sorted the person from 7.13 billion (10^9) to 8.3 million (10^6) worst case in two questions.
Ultimately, we are 'sorting' 7 billion people (to identify one), so it is extra important to do this as quickly as possible. Ultimately, each individual is an outlier or else we can not identify them individually.
Are you male? yes (3.5 billion of 7 billion), no? Are you female? yes? (3.5 billion of 7 billion) no? Then you are a intersex. This requires at least 2 questions to identify outliers like hermaphrodites (http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency). Thus it is actually better to ask "are you a intersex?" first, because we learn something. Asking about your gender would seem to me to be one of the next to last questions used to identify an individual because while bubble sort will get the job done, it is just far more efficient to use a quicksort.
Agreed, 2^33 is 8 billion 589 million 934 thousand 592, and the world has around 7.13 billion people. The math works.
http://www.jackhagley.com/The-World-as-100-People
This gives you a great clue into some of the questions you need to narrow down different demographics as rapidly as possible. However, I have no ideas about how to bring that down to the individual level.
For example: if you are one of the 13 people without access to clean water - we know your are one of 780 million people, and you are very likely in Africa (355 million), India (206 million), Asia (210 million) or Latin America (42 million) or one of 10 million in the remaining countries.
So "Do you have access to clean water?" rapidly narrows down the world, but where do you go next? Do you live in north America? a no-yes answer narrows the subject from one in 7.13 billion to one in 1.7 million (http://win-water.org/reports/RCAP_full_final.pdf) with two questions. If not then we have somebody who is one of 8.3 million living in Europe, Russia or Australia. So either way we have sorted the person from 7.13 billion (10^9) to 8.3 million (10^6) worst case in two questions.
Ultimately, we are 'sorting' 7 billion people (to identify one), so it is extra important to do this as quickly as possible. Ultimately, each individual is an outlier or else we can not identify them individually.
Are you male? yes (3.5 billion of 7 billion), no? Are you female? yes? (3.5 billion of 7 billion) no? Then you are a intersex. This requires at least 2 questions to identify outliers like hermaphrodites (http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency). Thus it is actually better to ask "are you a intersex?" first, because we learn something. Asking about your gender would seem to me to be one of the next to last questions used to identify an individual because while bubble sort will get the job done, it is just far more efficient to use a quicksort.