Twenty questions with uncertain answers

If you're playing twenty questions (say on something simple like "numbers from 1 to a 1000") the best strategy is to divide the output into two with each guess[1]. Eg. Higher than 500? Yes. Higher than 750? No. Higher than 625? Yes. Etc. Etc. This will take log(N) questions to find the exact answer. (Guessing randomly may produce the answer quicker, but on average will take mcuh longer.)

However, suppose when you ask a question, you're given the answer, but it's right only 90% of the time. (For simplicity, assume you can find out if you've got the right single answer at the end.) What's the right strategy? Is it to ask "Higher than 500" twice or more until you're sure? Or to follow the normal strategy until it gives a unique answer, and if that's wrong, start again?

The second game feels like what I often end up feeling like in real life... :)

[1] I remember reading a book that said learning to "gain information" from a guess rather than "make a right guess" was quite difficult for children to learn -- a teacher reported many children guess "higher than X" when they already knew it true, because they'd been so conditioned by class to expect a "yes, that's right" to be a good thing and "no, that's wrong" to be a bad thing.

Wheresmystuff 0.6r

WheresMyStuff version 0.6r is at wheresmystuff.heroku.com.

You can log in, and add and remove loans.

The major feature still missing is any authentication of the login -- anyone can log in as "Jack" or as "jack.dreamwidth.org" simply by typing it in the box and hitting return.

(But it's almost better for testing, as the main feature of creating a loan to "John" and then logging in as "John" and seeing the same loan works and is easier to test when it's easy to log in as different people.)

Don't use the site for real data yet -- there's no authentication, so anyone can edit it, and there's no independent backups, and the next step involves some changes to the database which may end up nuking the data. But if you're curious to see how it works, I'd be very curious to know if it works for you.

There's a lot of features (and design) I really wanted to add, but authentication is the only thing I that's absolutely necessary before it's possible to use it.