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MarkDunne / 33-questions

33 Questions
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Project is statistically impossible. #50

Open CatmanIX opened 10 years ago

CatmanIX commented 10 years ago

Even if you can come up with 33 Questions that perfectly divide the human population as desired you'll run in to at least two issues in the coming years:

  1. Human population will exceed 8,589,934,592 (or 111111111111111111111111111111111 in binary)
  2. Shifts in the divisions created by particular questions will change, completely breaking everything.
johnjreiser commented 10 years ago

Even if this project were to capture a single moment in time, it would be incredibly difficult to factor all 2^33 humans into one set of questions. But it's an thought-provoking proposition nonetheless. I plan on using this project (and the difficulties faced) as an example when discussing data classification with my students.

justinabrahms commented 10 years ago

You could perhaps extend the amount of time this project is useful by couching it in dates. "On November 23rd, 2013, were you male?" etc.

You could possibly generate questions based on the people currently alive at a time and provide a few different bits for progeny.

"On November 23rd, 2013.. did your father live in a city?"