Playing Guess Who with your kids: Code-word strategy against adversaries

Guess Who is a two-player search game in which each player chooses a character from a deck of 24 cards, and has to infer the other player's character by asking yes-no questions. A simple binary search strategy allows the starting player find the opponent's character by asking 5 questions only, when the opponent is honest.

Real-life observations show that in more realistic scenarios, the game is played against adversaries that do not strictly follow the rules, e.g., kids. Such players might decide to answer all questions at once, answer only part of the questions as they do not know the answers to all, and even lie occasionally. We devise strategies for such scenarios using techniques from error-correcting and erasure codes. This connects to a recent line of work on search problems on graphs and trees with unreliable auxiliary information, and could be of independent interest.