Twenty Questions
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Twenty Questions was a popular radio and television quiz series based on the spoken parlor game which encourages deductive reasoning and creativity.
One player is chosen to be the answerer. That person chooses a subject but does not reveal this to the others. All other players are questioners. They each take turns asking a question which can be answered with a simple "Yes" or "No." In variants of the game (see below), multiple state answers may be included such as the answer "Maybe." The answerer answers each question in turn. Sample questions could be: "Is it in this room?" or "Is it bigger than a breadbox?" Lying is not allowed, as it would ruin the game. If a questioner guesses the correct answer, that questioner wins and becomes the answerer for the next round. If 20 questions are asked without a correct guess, then the answerer has stumped the questioners and gets to be the answerer for another round.
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[edit] Popular variants
The most popular variant is called "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other". In this version, the answerer tells the questioners at the start of the game whether the subject is an animal, vegetable, mineral, or other. The game defines an animal as a member of the animal kingdom, a vegetable as a member of the plant kingdom, a mineral as anything geological, and other as anything else. This can produce odd technicalities, such as a wooden table being classified as a vegetable (since wood comes from trees). Other versions specify that the item to be guessed should be in a given category, such as actions, occupations, famous people, etc. In Hungary, a similar game is named after Simon bar Kokhba.
[edit] Radio and television
In the 1940s the game became a popular radio panel quiz show, first broadcast at 8pm EST, Saturday, February 2, 1946, on the Mutual Broadcasting System from the Longacre Theatre on West 48th Street in Manhattan. Radio listeners sent in subjects for the panelists to guess in 20 questions; Winston Churchill's cigar was the subject most frequently submitted. On the early shows, listeners who stumped the panel won a lifetime subscription to Pageant. From 1946 to 1951, the program was sponsored by Ronson Lighters. In 1952-53, Wildroot Cream Oil was the sponsor.
The panel consisted of the creator of the show, Fred Van Deventer (1903-1971), and his wife, Florence, who used her maiden name, appearing on the show as Florence Rinard. Van Deventer was a WOR Radio newscaster with New York's highest-rated news show. Their 14-year-old son, Robert (known on the show as Bobby McGuire) and the program's producer, Herb Polesie, completed the regular panel with daughter Nancy Van Deventer joining the group on occasions. Celebrity guests rarely (though sometimes) contributed to identifying the subject at hand. The Van Deventer family had played the game for years and were so expert at it that they could often nail the answer after only six or seven questions. On one memorable show, Maguire succeeded in giving the correct answer ("Brooklyn") without asking a question but basing his guess on the audience response.
The moderator was sportscaster Bill Slater (1902-1965). He answered the queries the panel asked in order to identify the subject. This cast remained largely intact throughout the decade-long run of the show. Slater was succeeded at the beginning of 1953 by Jay Jackson, who remained through the final broadcast, and there were two changes in the juvenile chair on the panel.
When McGuire graduated from high school, his decision to go to Duke University meant he could no longer remain on the panel, so he asked his high school friend Johnny McPhee to replace him. Since McPhee was attending Princeton University, he was thus geographically available for the production in New York. McPhee continued until he graduated and was himself succeeded by Dick Harrison (real name John Beebe) in September 1953. Harrison continued until early 1954, when he was replaced by Bobby McGuire, then 22 years old. McGuire appeared as the "oldest living teenager" until the end of the run.
As a television program, Twenty Questions first appeared on WWOR-TV, Channel 9, November 2, 1949, then nationwide on the DuMont Television Network and finally on the ABC. The last radio show was broadcast in March 27, 1954, followed by the last television program in May 1955.
Rights were sold to several other countries, including the BBC, where the subject to be guessed was revealed to the audience by a "mystery voice." That format was briefly used again on BBC Radio 4 in the 1990s for a single season. A TV version was also made by Associated-Rediffusion in the early 1960s. The "mystery voice" gimmick gave rise to a running gag on the radio series I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue.
[edit] Trivia
- A version of Twenty Questions is played as a parlor game by characters of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
- The game suggests that the information (as measured by Shannon's entropy statistic) required to identify an arbitrary object is about 20 bits. The game is often used as an example when teaching people about information theory. Mathematically, if each question is structured to eliminate half the objects, 20 questions will allow the questioner to distinguish between 220 or 1,048,576 subjects. Accordingly, the most effective strategy for Twenty Questions is to ask questions that will split the field of remaining possibilities roughly in half each time. The process is analogous to a binary search algorithm in computer science.
- In some variants, the first question asked has the options "Animal, Vegetable or Mineral". This is taken from the "Major-General's Song," a piece from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Pirates of Penzance.
- "I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical"
- The Oxford Guide to Word Games, by Tony Augarde, Chapter 23, "Twenty Questions," page 197, notes:
- "The game has sometimes been called Animal, Vegetable and Mineral or Yes and No. The latter was the name used in Dickens’s Christmas Carol: It was a game called Yes and No, where Scrooge’s nephew had to think of something, and the rest must find out what; he only answering to their questions yes or no, as the case was. The brisk fire of questioning to which he was exposed, elicited from him that he was thinking of an animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and lived in London, and walked about the streets, and wasn’t made a show of, and wasn’t led by anybody, and didn’t live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market, and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a fresh roar of laughter, and was so inexpressibly tickled, that he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last the plump sister, falling into a similar state, cried out:
- ‘I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I know what it is!’
- ‘What is it?’ cried Fred.
- ‘It’s your Uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!’"
[edit] Listen to
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- 20Q.net - Play 20 Questions against the computer with this artificial intelligence version of Twenty Questions. "Everything that it knows and all questions that it asks were entered by people playing the game."
- Barelybad Web Site Detailed rules of the game.
- One: the movie Independent filmmaker Ward Powers presents interviews employing 20 ultimate questions on the meaning of life. (Is the correct guess "one"?)
- Zoo Keeper: The animal guessing gameVersion of 20 questions restricted to animals.
