We consider a variant of the classical 20 question game with lies (also known as
the Ulam-R\' enyi game).
There are two players: Paul (the Questioner) and Carole (the Oracle).
Carole selects a number without revealing it to Paul.
Paul asks membership questions of the form "Is ?", where .
Carole's aim is to maximize the number of questions Paul must ask.
She is allowed to lie up to times.
Paul wins if, after questions, exactly one value of remains possible; otherwise, Carole wins.
It is known [1] that Carole can win whenever , where
.
We study the -interval Ulam-R\' enyi game where each query set is the union of at most intervals.
Recently it was shown [2] that Paul can win the game with lies and intervals,
using questions for sufficiently large .
In this paper, we show that three intervals suffice for Paul to win when .
It remains an open problem whether Paul can win using three-interval sets for all values of .
References.
[1] E.~R. Berlekamp. Block coding for the binary symmetric channel with noiseless,
delayless feedback. In {\em Error-Correcting Codes}, pp. 61--68. Wiley, 1968.
[2] F.~Cicalese and M.~Rossi. On the multi-interval {U}lam-{R}{\'{e}}nyi game: For 3 lies 4
intervals suffice. {\em Theor. Comput. Sci.}, 809:339--356, 2020.