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No. 264:

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/postcard/?comic=264

Pounded into a keyboard by monkeys assisted by: Henning Makholm

The author writes:

The game of Wheeler Twenty Questions was described by John Gribbin in In Search of Schrödinger's Cat:

When it was his turn to be sent from the room so that the other guests could decide what object should be "it", he was locked out for an "unbelievably long" time, a sure sign that the collaborators were choosing a singularly difficult word or were up to some mischief. On his return, he found that the answers, from each guest in turn, came quickly at first in response to questions like "Is it an animal?" and "Is it green?" but that as the game progressed the answers took longer and longer to come [...] There had been a plot not to agree on an object to be guessed, but that each person, when asked, must give a truthful answer concerning some real object in his mind, and which was consistent with all the answers that had gone before. As the game went on, it became as difficult for the questioned as for the questioner.

Supposedly, I think, this kind of story makes it easier to grok quantum mechanics. Myself I am struck by how well it works as an analogy for running a webcomic that has become infested with Continuity.

The strange thing is, the game doesn't seem to become appreciably easier when there is only one player.