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The expected value of the game is positive regardless of Ballmer’s strategy
A few days ago John Graham-Cumming posted about “Steve Ballmer’s incorrect binary search interview question” which drew a lot of attention on Hacker News. The Ballmer’s favorite brain teaser goes like this:
He can strategically pick numbers that would require the longest time for you to find using binary search. If Ballmer is aware of your strategy, he can always select one of these “losing” numbers, resulting in a loss for you in every game. Finding the mixed strategy that wins on every number can be viewed as a mathematical optimization problem.
Or read this on Hacker News
