Searching games with errors—fifty years of coping with liars

• Published in 2002
• Added on 2026-06-24

This is a survey on searching with errors, considered in the framework of two-person games. The Responder thinks of an object in the search space, and the Questioner has to find it by asking questions to which the Responder provides answers, some of which are erroneous. We give a taxonomy of such games, depending on the type of questions allowed, on the degree of interactivity between the players, and on the imposed limitations on errors. We survey the existing results concerning such games, concentrating on the issue of optimizing the Questioner's querying strategy, and pointing out open problems. We show the relations between searching games with errors and problems concerning communication through a noisy channel and error-correcting codes. Finally, we discuss other search and computation problems with faulty feedback which are related to searching with errors.

Links

• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304397501003036?via%3Dihub

Other information

BibTeX entry

@article{Searchinggameswitherrorsfiftyyearsofcopingwithliars,
	key = {Searchinggameswitherrorsfiftyyearsofcopingwithliars},
	type = {article},
	title = {Searching games with errors—fifty years of coping with liars},
	author = {Andrzej Pelc},
	abstract = {This is a survey on searching with errors, considered in the framework of two-person games. The Responder thinks of an object in the search space, and the Questioner has to find it by asking questions to which the Responder provides answers, some of which are erroneous. We give a taxonomy of such games, depending on the type of questions allowed, on the degree of interactivity between the players, and on the imposed limitations on errors. We survey the existing results concerning such games, concentrating on the issue of optimizing the Questioner's querying strategy, and pointing out open problems. We show the relations between searching games with errors and problems concerning communication through a noisy channel and error-correcting codes. Finally, we discuss other search and computation problems with faulty feedback which are related to searching with errors.},
	comment = {},
	date_added = {2026-06-24},
	date_published = {2002-06-24},
	urls = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304397501003036?via{\%}3Dihub},
	collections = {drama,games-to-play-with-friends,protocols-and-strategies},
	url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304397501003036?via{\%}3Dihub},
	year = 2002,
	urldate = {2026-06-24}
}