Conditioning a state by a Łukasiewicz event: a probabilistic approach to Ulam games (Q1978507)

The game of twenty questions with lies, first considered by Ulam and Rényi, is an important chapter of the theory of error correcting codes with feedback. See the survey paper by \textit{F. Cicalese, U. Vaccaro} and the present reviewer [``Rota-Metropolis cubic logic and Ulam-Rényi games'', in: D. Senato (ed.), Proceedings of a Conference held in Maratea, Italy, in Memoriam Gian-Carlo Rota (Springer-Verlag) (to appear)]. The Ulam-Rényi game also yields a natural semantics for Łukasiewicz many-valued logic. See the monograph of \textit{R. Cignoli, I. M. L. D'Ottaviano} and \textit{D. Mundici} [Algebraic foundations of many-valued reasoning (Trends in Logic -- Studia Logica Library 7, Kluwer, Dordrecht) (2000; Zbl 0937.06009)]. The present paper is essentially concerned with the following problem: ``How should one bet in a Ulam-Rényi game with lies?'' The appropriate many-valued notions of state and conditional state are applied to an analysis of the information-theoretic content of the game, in the light of Dempster's rule. For optimal search strategies to find the unknown number with random lies, one must ask those questions ensuring that entropy is balanced between positive and negative answers.