Twenty questions with random error (Q6985454)

This fascinating monograph studies a modern version of the so called ``Twenty questions'' game. \N\NThe game itself is defined between two players and starts from a player named an oracle, who privately thinks of a secret. The other player, called the questioner, tries to guess the secret by querying the oracle with at most twenty questions having Yes/No answers. The players are assumed to be honest and lying is prohibited.\N\NThe Twenty Questions game has an interesting history traced back as far as ancient Rome and Greece with numerous mathematical interpretations since then. For example, one modern mathematical formulation is guessing an integer from a finite set, where the oracle could lie either randomly to each question or lie to a finite number of questions. Remarkably, many modern mathematical studies and interpretations of this game motivates several current important applications for example in communications, machine learning; and computer vision. \N\NThe authors address numerous new theoretical interpretations of this game (with random error) as well as numerous new interdisciplinary applications both theoretically and numerically. \N\NThe monograph is a well-rounded and an extremely solid and mathematically interesting contribution to the literature. It is well written with open research problems and an excellent set of references.