(The scoring was easier, too: 1 point for a unique answer, otherwise no points.) It was always interesting to see how many times people come up with the same obvious answer, or the same non-obvious answer (second-guessing the obvious answer), or the same in-joke answer.
A few years ago I used to hang around on rec.puzzles, on which (among many other threads) two different people would post regular contests called 'Common Answers' and 'Rare Entries'. Each contest would take the form of a quiz with no obvious 'right' answers, containing questions of the form 'name a foo' where the set of possible foo was finite but not too big. The scoring systems were exactly opposed: in Common Answers you scored a lot of points by having the same answer as many other people, whereas in Rare Entries you scored higher for having fewer people pick your answer.
The curious thing was that in both, you were often tempted to pick wrong answers. For instance, in Common Answers one would be tempted to answer 'Name a scary insect' with 'SPIDER' despite knowing that spiders aren't insects, because one anticipated that lots of people who didn't know that would pick that answer. Or would they? I mean, it's rec.puzzles, surely it's crawling with people who know all the trick questions. But maybe each of them thinks everyone else is stupid, so they'll still all say SPIDER. Or perhaps not... Whereas Rare Entries was less a matter of second-guessing and more one of brinkmanship, so you'd try to name something that just about qualified for the terms of the question but was so borderline nobody else would have dared to say it. As a result, Rare Entries had to be rigorously marked by the question-setter to rule out actually wrong answers, because otherwise you could trivially guarantee uniqueness by answering everything with a string of random letters long enough to make it vanishingly unlikely that anyone else even with the same strategy would have picked the same one; whereas (though there were debates about this) Common Answers could accept any answer in principle, even if wrong, and people would be drawn towards right or sort of right answers just by means of their self-interest.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-11-04 11:35 pm (UTC)A few years ago I used to hang around on
rec.puzzles, on which (among many other threads) two different people would post regular contests called 'Common Answers' and 'Rare Entries'. Each contest would take the form of a quiz with no obvious 'right' answers, containing questions of the form 'name a foo' where the set of possible foo was finite but not too big. The scoring systems were exactly opposed: in Common Answers you scored a lot of points by having the same answer as many other people, whereas in Rare Entries you scored higher for having fewer people pick your answer.The curious thing was that in both, you were often tempted to pick wrong answers. For instance, in Common Answers one would be tempted to answer 'Name a scary insect' with 'SPIDER' despite knowing that spiders aren't insects, because one anticipated that lots of people who didn't know that would pick that answer. Or would they? I mean, it's
rec.puzzles, surely it's crawling with people who know all the trick questions. But maybe each of them thinks everyone else is stupid, so they'll still all say SPIDER. Or perhaps not... Whereas Rare Entries was less a matter of second-guessing and more one of brinkmanship, so you'd try to name something that just about qualified for the terms of the question but was so borderline nobody else would have dared to say it. As a result, Rare Entries had to be rigorously marked by the question-setter to rule out actually wrong answers, because otherwise you could trivially guarantee uniqueness by answering everything with a string of random letters long enough to make it vanishingly unlikely that anyone else even with the same strategy would have picked the same one; whereas (though there were debates about this) Common Answers could accept any answer in principle, even if wrong, and people would be drawn towards right or sort of right answers just by means of their self-interest.