Saturday nights,
tvN, South Korea,
Starting Saturday 7th December 2013
We’re keeping our fingers crossed for English subtitles. Amazing Youtube user Bumdidlyumptious very kindly subbed the first series and has suggested they will do the second. Don’t expect them immediately, would be my advice. Unfortunately Youtube has taken them down but they might still be possible to view, you can follow on Twitter for latest news. Edit: they’re viewable through links on her Tumblr.
Episode 1 discussion (including links) starts here.
Episode 2 discussion starts here.
Episode 3 discussion starts here.
Episode 4 discussion starts here.
Episode 5 discussion starts here.
Episode 6 discussion starts here.
Episode 7 discussion starts here.
Episode 8 discussion starts here.
Episode 9 discussion starts here.
Episode 10 discussion starts here.
Episode 11 discussion starts here.
Episode 12 discussion starts here.
What is The Genius?
The Genius is a very interesting South Korean cable reality game that pits 13 Korean celebrities against each other in social games of strategy, logic, mental agility and psychological skill. Winning games means winning garnets, the show’s currency, which can be used to make games easier (buying extra hints, for example) or for use to buy favour with other contestants. Losing games means risking elimination in the Death Match. At the end of the series the last player standing gets all their garnets converted into hard cash. It’s heavily influenced by the Japanese Liar Game manga series.
It’s also very stylish, with interesting use of flashbacks and forwards, graphics, and a terrific soundtrack borrowed variously from films and amazing Korean electronic band Idiotape. I wholeheartedly recommend their album.
And if that trailer looked good, you can watch the entire first series subbed. Here’s what we thought of it.
If you’re a regular reader of the Bar it is very likely this is a show that will hold some appeal for you. For the second series I thought it would be fun to have its own page for discussion of the show – quality of challenges, quality of strategy, quality of contestants. There’s likely to be a lot to talk about!
Spoiler Warnings:
If it has been subbed it is fair game. Links to subbed episodes can be found on Bumpdidlyumptious’ Twitter feed. Enter at your own risk!
If you’re watching it from Korea (for example!) we would appreciate limiting discussion to episodes that are viewable with English subtitles.
Urgh Jiwon. That’s all I have to say.
Actually someone did the maths for same picture hunt. Junghyun found the correct strategy.
18% for hongchul to get 3 right.
Then you have to minus off some percentage for junghyun also getting it right from hongchul guesses.
The final results is less than 10% chance for hongchul.
Garnets are the determining factor in this DM.
I’ve noticed that the show shuffles the cards in a not entirely random fashion to avoid duplicates being close together, which would maximize the effectiveness of this strategy (since if Hongchul had a pair of identical tiles near his starting point, it would work greatly to his advantage if he could just find one). Between both times the game has been played, no 3 consecutive tiles contain a matching pair in any of the 4 starting lineups we’ve seen, which is quite improbable.
For those interested, the mathematics behind the strategy:
Let’s assume Hongchul has a photographic memory, i.e. give him the most optimistic estimate. He has to come back from his 2-tile handicap *and* get a third tile, because if they’re tied, he would fall first since he’s forced to play first.
He gets 8 guesses out of 16 to find his 1st tile, for a 50% chance. If he does, he has to find the 2nd tile by the 9th guess, including the guess he spent getting the 1st tile right. If he’s seen it already, that’s another guess spent, but let’s be optimistic again and assume he hasn’t. Then he can see 8 of the remaining 15 tiles. And similarly, if he’s lucky enough to get the 2nd tile, he can see 8 of the remaining 14 tiles for the 3rd tile. This gives an upper bound of (8/16)*(8/15)*(8/14)=16/105 or 15.24% chance to survive that far.
I’m not so sure that his overall chance is really less than 10% though. Just for fun, I created a computer simulation which runs under the following assumptions:
+ Both players have perfect memory, and will always guess correctly if their next tile has been revealed before.
+ If 15 tiles have been revealed, they can deduce the 16th one.
+ The tiles are shuffled completely at random.
My simulation gave Hongchul a 10.7% chance to win, although I think the perfect memory assumption may be the reason why it seems a bit high. If Hongchul were to actually luck out and hit that 15.24% chance of surviving past turn 8, he’d have control of the board while also having seen the majority of it, and perfect memory would magnify the advantage he’d gain from that.
15.64% has to minus 0.5(15.64) (the chance of junghyun getting his first tile from hongchul guesses even when hongchul found 3) and it goes on for when hongchul find 4 minus junghyun found 2.
I didn’t know who to root for of those in the death match… they’re probably the two most entertaining to watch. I was rooting for them two and the girl. But I think the winner deserved it, he was clever enough to come up with a unique strategy that works in his favor.
Next week’s match looks interesting! The Food Chain game looked intricate and fun, so a remake of that will surely be enjoyable to watch ^_^.
If you watch the bonus content, you’ll see that Sangmin gave him that strategy.
I expect Episode nine will come along today or thereabouts, so here’s your spoiler space:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
OK, discuss away (when it arrives)!
I am like foaming at the mouth for the subbed episode to be released. :-X
Bumdidlyumptious put up a cheat sheet to help with this ep’s main game Layoff- interesting to see the differences/similarities between this one and ep 1’s Food Chain….(the main one being the addition of salaries)
http://bxrme.tumblr.com/post/75608915096/layoff-cheat-sheet
Junghyun is damn strong! Whoever wrote him off on ep1 must be eating their words right now.
My two favorites went into the death match :(. Very sad indeed!
Interesting take on a game Schlag den Raab has used quite a few times in the deathmatch…
I reckon I could take Brig on at Black and White. Yeah. #smug
She was definitely using the same strategy I was going for, win small, lose big.
I didn’t like the main match, it felt even more complicated than the food chain game (I think the viewers didn’t know who had which salary at all). And I think if you gather seven people, you could easily kill enough people so the president wouldn’t win, but no one thought about that.
At first I thought the death match was good (okay, I really like both players, probably number 5 and 6 on my list of favourites (number 6 is still in it, the rest is gone long time now.)), but in the end it didn’t really matter which tiles were played, I think. It didn’t add enough strategy to the game. Maybe you could force the players to play the same colour as the opponent with the last 3 being excluded. That would make a change I think!
A pretty lacklustre affair, I thought. The main match was just confusing – at least when it was predator/prey you could just about keep up with the roles thanks to their animal links, but identifying people from cartoon heads and names was too much for me. I also think it was a real shame they brought other players back for this – if they had had a straight 5 player game it would have been really interesting to see how/if a team of not-Sangmin would succeed in ganging up on him, or if he’d wriggle out of it (probably by duping Jiwon). I also felt Sangmin was fortunate to land a role that seems very easy to win as long as you have enough people who either don’t care enough or are simply on your side – once he knew the identities of the two people ranked immediately below him (in one of whom’s interests it was to collude with him) all he had to do is find them over four rounds. Kinda like an easier version of the lion.
That said, what do we think would have happened if there had been three winners and Sangmin had been one of the losers? I can only presume that the token of immortality lets you choose *anyone* to take your place, but if you were limited to picking people without a token of life he’d presumably find himself in the death match anyway, which would have been amusing. (I can’t remember when Doohee used the fake token whether Sangmin had a token of life, although who knows if that’s how the ‘real’ one works anyway.)
The death match didn’t feel particularly open to strategy, and was a bit boring to watch (probably because I didn’t really care who went out). That said, it might have been fun to have only been shown one player’s information so you could at least try some playalong.
Still, onwards!
Food chain game didn’t need more complexity. All I could tell from the graphic overlay was which team somebody belonged to, and I couldn’t follow along despite reading the cheat sheet; Korean readers may have found it tractable. The other thing was that the visitors had no real stake in the game, so they visibly just went through the motions, resulting in a light, tension-free affair. When they tried roping friends in last year, the relationship kept them invested and the choice of person kept contestants more responsible for their fate. Finally, the seeming alignment between the main match roles and the overall game story tested my suspension of disbelief.
When you did the awesome Schlag hangout thing, I found all the games engaging and fun except for final one, which is so awful I tuned out to avoid it. Joy, a version with less, and harder to get, information is the deathmatch. I wonder if this could be fixed somehow. Perhaps having the blocks weight as much as their value and having the pieces offloaded in triplets into their hands at the beginning of the game would provide enough info to make this interesting.
Is it just me, or do main match losers seem to have an uncanny sense of when the deathmatch will advantage the garnet holder? High-garnet opponents are picked if, and only if, garnets don’t matter. Looks like the deathmatch is explained too early to them.
So now we’re out of female contestants. Surprised it took this long. Of course, there are no girl bands in Korea so we get several more (buffoon-looking) men instead. Wise.
In this case, I thought it was only sensible to use the deathmatch for garnets: Yooyoung wouldn’t want to be seriously uncompetitive in garnets.
I thought the Main Match was OK, but not great. Still a bit overly complex, I had to pause and reference the cheat sheet several times throughout. And I thought Sangmin lucked out yet again with one of the easier roles to win with, if not THE easiest, although it wasn’t nearly as overpowered as in Food Chain or 7 Commandments. It’s enough to make me suspect he’s been bribing the producers or something. On the bright side, at least the game gave us an “aha” moment or two, primarily in the fact that one character could get reinstated, and I enjoyed seeing the S1 players return. It kind of shows how much better the S1 casting was though. I felt they were still interesting to watch even if they didn’t seem to be giving it their all.
I rather liked the Death Match, although I do agree it may have been better if we only saw one player’s tiles for the play along factor. The strategy may not have been as deep as some other Death Matches, but there was still an interesting psychological factor of trying to read your opponent, and it’s not one the elimination candidates can brute force via alliances with the other players like they could with Winning Streak, Sun Moon Star, or that Dixit one from S1 that I can’t remember the name for.
I spent a good long while reviewing the cheat sheet before watching the episode, so I felt like I had a good understanding of what was going on, but I agree that the cartoon heads did nothing to clarify who was playing whom. I was interested when they teased a workplace re-skinning of Food Chain, but Food Chain is still the sine qua non of Main Match games, in my opinion, with Expression Auction a close second.
And yes, it was one thing when Sangmin got the snake in Food Chain and then the unlimited-veto-commandment in 7 Commandments, but this is still another instance of incredible luck of the draw. If I’m reading his character’s ability correctly, he can fire anyone (except the CEO) and no one can fire him. All he has to do to ensure he wins is fire enough people to meet his $ total (which was also not easy to follow). What a plum role! I’m not seriously calling shenanigan but I don’t blame those who do. Still, it was great to see Sangmin ham up his role. “Workplace romances aren’t allowed.”
I also regret to say I think bringing back S1 contestants did even more to favor Sangmin. They have no reason to help the other contestants, and no reason to take the game seriously since there is so little at stake for them. But I was happy to see them come back.
The Death Match was also not my favorite: a triumph of style over substance. They could have easily stalemated for many rounds. You could be fairly certain that both players would save the 8 for last. If you anticipated that move, you could perhaps backwards-devise a strategy, but this game seemed highly likely to end in a draw time after time.
Very sorry to see Yooyoung go. A strong competitor.
I think the proper backwards-devised strategy if you anticipated that the opponent would save the 8 for the end is to save your 0 or 1 for the end. That way, your own 8 would be guaranteed to earn you a point (provided you were right in anticipating your opponent saving their 8) in exchange for guaranteeing them a point at the end, but you could then aim to take out one of their higher-value tiles with your 8. In short, you’d both trade one point each but you’d come out ahead in remaining hand strength.
There could also be a metagame on top similar to poker, where you could use some acting to deceive your opponent. For example, you could play your 8 and then act surprised when you win, as if you were expecting to lose. If your opponent happened to play their 0 or 1, they might think you actually played your 2 and were just looking to get rid of a weak tile. Or conversely, act really surprised when you play your 0 and lose, as if you just wasted a perfectly good 6.
It’s tough to strategize for this game because if there was an obvious strategy, you could surely come up with another strategy that would beat it.
So, you have to play with at least some randomness.
But there are still general principles to follow:
* win small, lose big (easier said than done)
* use earlier rounds to gain information about your opponent’s cards (middling cards are more likely to give information without leaking any)
* if your opponent is likely to hold 8 to the end, you should hold 0 (but… now you have to get 1-2 rounds ahead)
I was unimpressed with this episode. As everybody and their dog has already remarked, Food Chain was complicated enough without adding salaries and obfuscating all of the role names. Putting in a bunch of S1 contestants seemed like it would inevitably solidify Sangmin’s position, even before he once again obtained a super-strong role. Like xr, I much prefered S1’s mechanic of allowing each contestant to recruit a friend as an ally.
Deathmatch felt like it should have strategy, but in the end didn’t. I wonder if there is a way to play such that one gains optimal information. In any event this was not explored and it ended up being somewhat random. Bring on the next episode!
I expect we’re due episode 10 soon so:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
There you go.
Does anyone here knows what is the music being used in the ending of ep 5 where they preview ep 6? Really nice and fast beat music.
My wife asked me what, if anything, is known about the designer or designers of the games. And I had no answer for her. Anyone else?
Hmmm, I vaguely remember reading that the producer was someone associated with the production of the Liar Game TV Show. I also happen to know that the very first Genius Game seemed like a variant of a RPS game from the Manga/TV Show “Kaiji”.
I tend to like the Season 1 games more, they seem more Prisoner Dillema-ish (the bread game, the thief game had an interesting strategy, the bean game). Several were varients of the Liar Games (the zombie game = pandemic game, the election game’s basic concept was that of the musical chair game).
As someone has mentioned, Season 2 games seem like variants of unique board games (the minus auction, the monopoly game, the proposing rules game with colored chips).
I think as we’ve previously discussed the S1 games tended towards more puzzles with solutions (although yes, more prisoner’s dilemma-esque as well) which I think are more fun to watch, but also as pointed out more difficult to repeat.
I certainly don’t think S1 is without it’s duffer games, the best ones didn’t usually rely on People Doing Maths Round A Table.
I don’t know what to write about this episode. I think the main match was not very good to watch. It seemed really complicated and I had no idea who was on a team with who. I also didn’t really like the outcome and I feel like Sangmin gave the token to Yohwan because this is better for the way people see him. I think if he had said those things and wouldn’t have given it to him, they wouldn’t have edited it in.
Anyway the death match was nice. I think it was a good decision to play Indian Hold’em now, much better than playing it back when Jinho left (which is still annoying me).And I think this showed how good Junghyun can be. Without any help or direction by Sangmin he was able to win. And last week doesn’t really count, this seemed to me like a game of luck somehow.
But the best bit about this episode was the preview. I really want to see that game, it seems great! However I have no idea how a team game will work. I’m just glad Jinho and Dohee are back and it seems they have a chance to beat the last 3 standing. And the idea of a team game is intriguing, though there are too many players invited (back) in this series in my opinion.
Think I largely agree with this, the explanation of the main match made it sound far more complex than it actually was and then it wasn’t actually that much fun, although I did enjoy the guy from Super Junior making secret deals between rounds for prize money.
The Elevator Game is surely going to be Tactical Snakes and Ladders.
I thought Sangmin would walk this, but he’s been handed victory on a plate every time and the newsreader guy has shown himself to be pretty good one on one. I think that would be an intriguing final match up. Yohwan just seems to be making up the numbers, he’s consistantly towards the bottom in the Main Matches and doesn’t seem to have the killer instinct to get people onside for his plans
I rant on Yowhan below, but to me it doesn’t look like he has problems getting people onboard. It just seems like he is terribly insecure and bolts out of his own plan for no good reason, with this episode and the negative auction being the most egregious examples. And then he pays for it.
And yes, Tactical Snakes and Ladders was my thought for the next main match as well. I hope there is more, because if so I project, based on Yutnori plays, something like 12 straight hours of button pushing.
I don’t think Yohwan “bolts out of his own plan for no good reason”, at least not this time. I thought by the time he abandoned his plan, it was pretty clear that Junghyun was starting to betray him and abandon their plan already. If I were in Yohwan’s position, I wouldn’t trust Junghyun very much either, since Junghyun’s previous actions (such as sucking up to Sangmin because he had the token of immortality and the most garnets, then turning around the very next episode and hopping on the “let’s force Sangmin to use up his token” bandwagon) had made it clear that he tends to be a fair-weather friend when it comes to alliances within the game.
The Negative Auction was a bit more debatable though; I agree he was far too hasty to abandon his plan that time and just screwed himself over, but considering the way Junghyun and Jiwon had behaved in previous games, I don’t blame him for not trusting them. But I still think he should’ve felt it out a bit more before deciding whether or not to abandon ship.
I do think Yohwan was more interesting to watch when Jinho was still around, since that alliance would actually carry out their plans all the way through. My theory is that Jinho was playing to win the whole series by focusing on long-term gains, primarily in terms of alliances, rather than readily throwing others under the bus just to win immunity once the way so many other contestants have done this season.
I absolutely adored the design of the main match, and found it to be the best of the current series. After all, it is visually clear, boisterous, and it supports a social game, careful deduction and mathematical tomfoolery. What’s not to like?
Oh yes, Yowhan was in it. His bright ideas, without fail, end up putting him in a worse position than the one he started out of, and his fickle, terrible play always has fun-sucking consequences for the players and the viewers. He is, by some margin, the weakest link, which is why he got carried through to the final three. For a few episodes now I have been dreading every shot of him beginning to talk. May he never be invited onto the show again, even if he somehow flukes into a win.
What’s the point of garnet-dependent deathmatches if you’re going to force largess on your leader again? It looks like they’re saving their episode from an anticlimax, but they are in fact dooming the series. They are teaching players that garnets don’t matter, so their main match degenerates into a sucking-up fest of Big Brother proportions and hare-brained Yowhan-style schemes. Let there be ugly victories – you promised.
Boy band was surprisingly enjoyable – can we get some of them for season three?
I think the point about garnets is good, I think their distribution has been a bit odd this year (where they basically just dumped a load out at the beginning) compared to last year (where they were quite hard fought for generally).
Based on the promo, here’s what I think might happen (and tactical Snakes and Ladders sounds right):
-Pressing the button (to determine how far a piece advances)is going to be vital for the three players still in the game. Say if their team wins (since it looks like it’s those three vs the eliminated players), whoever pressed the button the most times goes to the finals automatically.
-If that’s tied between two players, the 3rd player goes to the finals. If all three are tied, the eliminated players decide who is safe.
-If the eliminated players win, then whoever pressed the button the most times is in the deathmatch. If it’s a two way tie, those two go. If all three are tied, the eliminated players decide who’s safe.
-I’m guessing the prize will be something like 15 garnets; if the eliminated players win, they split the prize, if the semifinalists win, whoever goes through to the finals get the garnets.
There was something I didn’t understand about the main match… can a player decline the master’s proposal? For example, once they realized the one dude (the self proclaimed ‘fat dude’) wasn’t giving himself the massive amount of points for red and was giving it away to another band member… could someone else in the negotiation say “nevermind, I don’t want this to succeed because it’s clear you’re teaming up with the other dude’s team”. I’m surprised I didn’t see this. It was interesting, and was a traditional game theory game in concept (I forget the exact game, but there’s a game in game theory where one player divides money/points and the second player can choose to accept or decline the offer, same concept).
I’m pleased with the winner of the death match ^_^. Next week looks interesting. I can’t explain why, but I really dislike an all-male cast :(.
I hope we’ll see more women on the next season, maybe one of the boyband members and the winner of this season. But then again I hope Yohwan won’t win, I don’t want to see him playing like this for just one more episode. Well, my gut is telling me that he’ll be at least in the finale though…
I was a bit worried partway through the Main Match that it’d just devolve into all metagame and no game like the Monopoly game. It sorta went halfway there, but the metagame part actually wasn’t half bad this time, with regards to the alliance between Yohwan and Sangmin, and it didn’t render the main game moot either. All things considered, I quite liked it.
The Death Match dragged on a bit though, and all the shuffling footage at the start was excessive. However, I do have to compliment the editors on the way the decisive hand near the end was shown from Jiwon’s perspective in terms of the information displayed. It got me playing along trying to read Junghyun to figure out if Jiwon actually held a low(er) card or if Junghyun was simply bluffing, possibly trying to get Jiwon to lay down a straight. I still wish we could’ve gotten that sorta editing for last week’s Death Match.
Main Match: In many ways, the Big Deal was a return to form, but it still had its pros and cons. I agree with all the positive attributes xr described. To me, there was a bit too much left to chance: partners were drawn by lots. Color cubes were distributed randomly. The order of the leader was drawn by random. The qualifying colors for each negotiation also drawn randomly. That’s a lot of randomness.
There were nuances to the game that weren’t clear from mummyface’s intro, and that never became (to me) fully clear, such as Clicky’s question: what is the capacity of the non-leader to scuttle the negotiation while it is underway?
Perhaps the most intriguing part is that none of the Super Juniors knew which Genius player was on their team. That mechanism bears further exploration, but this game had too much other clutter for that part of the game play to be prominent. Ongepatchket, as my grandmother would say.
Death Match: I enjoy the personalities on this show, it is almost as big a draw as the gameplay. So I love Jiwon and Junghyun. But for some time now, I’ve been thinking to myself, “Do these two really deserve to be this close to the end of game called The Genius? Have they distinguished themselves?” In the last few episodes, Junghyun has stepped out of the shadows to show some skillful gameplay, so that’s resolved. But Jiwon, as much as I liked him, should have been gone a long time ago.
My theory is that Sangmin was making Jiwon this season’s Sunggyu: a lesser, weaker player that he could cozy up to to protect him and help bring him further into the game. However, Sangmin has so much going for him that it wasn’t even necessary. I’m not sure where the storyline about Junghyun being Sangmin’s right hand man came into play, but then also apparently for weeks Sangmin has been planning to save Yohwan if he should ever go to the death match. So Sangmin has alliances with everyone, is the garnet leader, and keeps getting incredibly lucky draws even in weeks when they don’t bring all his old friends back to play with him. Sometimes everything just breaks your way. Nice to be Sangmin. I’ll be the first to predict he wins this season. I have a 1-in-3 chance of being right.
I remember Jiwon in the first episode, unable to follow the rules of Food Chain, not able to believe his luck when, in the rehearsal, he drew the Egyptian Plover and correctly guessed the identity of the crocodile and then, in the main match, despite pleading to be the snake, drew a weak prey animal and, by virtue of his fellow prey being eaten, became invincible. Or the way he gummed up the 5-in-a-row chair game for no good reason, or went all in against Jinho. Lots of great content from Jiwon this season. A genius? Probably not. But neither was Hongchul, and he’s my favorite character from either season.
Along those lines, yes it was quite clear that Shindong – the stout idol from Super Junior – was using this as his audition video to be on the next season.
Since apparently the producers are not above repurposing tabletops games for this show, what existing game would you adapt for next season?
Although I wouldn’t have minded if the cubes were reassigned between rounds, once again for the Genius the apparently random distribution isn’t. The hands were designed to be balanced, with the rare cubes always being paired with very common ones; there’s a summary card after the draw you may examine. Also, the contracts were pre-constructed (and possibly pre-ordered) to avoid freakish distributions. Which is why they didn’t randomly pull cubes out of the bags for either thing, but instead relied on slips of paper.
Far as boardgame adaptations go, the obvious candidate is Ca$h and Guns, mostly on visual appeal.
This a game where a pot of chips in awkward denominations is up for grabs each round. Players simultaneously point (foam) guns at each other. Cowards may retreat and get no money. Then guns are fired. Bullets are limited, and first strike bullets more so, so a lot of guns aren’t actually loaded. Wounded don’t get a share for that round, and receiving a few wounds kills you. Winners must split the pot equally, with leftovers rolling over. In the advanced version, rule-bending superpowers are dealt out in secret, and revealed at the player’s choice.
In an adaptation, you’d play a few games of increasing reward in sequence, with the winners of each getting to exchange their round earnings for superpowers to be used later. Players who die at the final round lose, winner is the last game survivor who made more money over all games, survivors transform chips to garnets.
Honourable mention goes to Two Rooms and a Boom, which is practically perfect out of the box.
Players are secretly split into two teams by giving them cards. One part of the card is team allegiance, and the other special ability, if any. Thus players can choose to share partial information about themselves. All games have a bomber on one team, who kills everyone in the room he ends the game at, and a president on the other, who must survive for his team to win. Players are then randomly assigned into two rooms. Each room votes in a leader, who must exile a number of players to the other room at the end of each round. Repeat a few times, with the number of exiled players and the time limit both steadily dropping.
For an adaptation, I’d go something like: All the players of the winning team are immune. All surviving players get a garnet. If president’s side wins, they vote on the first player to be sent to the deathmatch. If the bomber’s side wins, he alone chooses who to send to the deathmatch.
As a death match I would adapt “Crosswise”. As my explanation is bad, I hope you all know it. However I’ll write my explanation at the End. Crosswise could be played twice a series, one time 1 vs 1, next time 2 vs 2 with each death match participant choosing one player to help them just like tactical yutnoori. I think it’s visually not bad (well some colours like yellow would have to be changed and you’d need to be able to do over head shots, but that’s not really a problem I guess).
Here’s my Explanation:
It’s a simple boardgame where you have to try to gather as many tiles of one symbol as possible in one row (up to 6, there are 7 tiles of every symbol I think, 6 different symbols plus 4 different lifelines with 3 tiles each). You have 4 tiles on your hand drawn randomly. The thing is, one player plays it horizontally, the other one vertically. (So one player’s rows are counted vertically the other one’s horizontally. It’s a 6 x 6 grid.)So the Tiles you place can help the other player.
The winner is the first team to have one row of 6 tiles with just one symbol or, if no one succeeds to do this, the tiles are counted (e.g. 2 same symbols= 1 point,… 5 same symbols= 7 points).
Given that there have been a number of “who has the higher tile?” games, I think it’s a matter of time before we get Goofspiel, whether here or on Schlag den Someone.
There’s another game I’ve seen in the past that sounds highly relevant, though; I can’t remember its name so here’s the closest description that I can remember. Take a deck of multiple sets of cards numbered one to (say) six and deal each player three. One player leads with a card from their hand, the other follows, and the trick is taken by the player whose card is higher. If there’s a tie then the next trick is worth one more trick; if the last trick is tied then neither player gets it. The player who takes two tricks scores one point, first to 12 (or 9 or 7 or n) points wins.
So far, all luck. However, the twist is that the game is played with a doubling cube – at any time before playing a card, you can offer to double the value of the game, so the player who takes two tricks wins two points not one, or the opponent can fold and concede the current value of the game. No player can double twice in a row in one deal, though players can go back and forth with doubling until, basically, they’re both all-in. (If you want to be fancy, apply the Crawford Rule.)
Think about it: suppose one deal has gone 1-1 and you’re just about to play your last card. You know you’re going to win. Surely you offer a double and stand to win two points rather than one – but, if your opponent sees you offer the double, surely they know they would rather concede one point rather than two. Except if they think you might be bluffing by offering the double in the first place! Then think about offering the doubling cube even earlier if you’re sure of your hand… You can get into all sorts of fun Iocaine Powder style multiple bluffs that way. Cue Extreme Ways.
Incidentally I read that Extreme Ways keeps getting played at the end of (at least some of) the Bourne movies, so I guess that’s the association that they must be going for.
I will stick up a post for Ep 11 tomorrow, but if you haven’t watched it, Bump. stuck up a recently broadcast episode of Korean TV show “I Live Alone”, this week featuring Jinho (also featuring special guest appearences from other Genius alumni Doowee and Yohwon) and it’s really good – a lighthearted look at the day in the life of Jinho whilst he, Hongchul and others commentate and ask questions over the footage. It’s interesting and funny and worth watching:
So episode 10’s game, shall we say, owed a lot to I’m The Boss! by the late, great Sid Sackson in 1994 (under its original German name, Kohle, Kie$ & Knete). The show has simplified it a fair bit, wisely, in order to make it much more of a game show game. Personally, the original board game is clearly among my top not-very-many of all time even after only a couple of plays. On the other hand, perhaps it didn’t shine to its greatest light on this show; it didn’t feel like there was an Aha! to it in the way that the best episodes have had; perhaps it’s possible to distinguish episodes where they play games from episodes where they play puzzles and I prefer the latter. (On the other hand, if some other nation wanted to make a show like The Genius without springing for licensing fees, they could make it all adaptations of board games…)
This playing of it was an incidence where the metagame rapidly overtook the game, so it didn’t show the game off to its full potential. Quite possibly contrary to what has been said about some of the games in the past, I don’t think this one was being played at all that high a level, probably as a consequence. It would probably have been easier to follow if they had reminded me of who player’s teammates were as each player became active, not immediately after they had concluded a deal. I’m also tempted to feel that the game might have been fairer if cubes had been redrawn between rounds to share out the benefit of owning one of the scarce colours, but that wasn’t an issue in practice. (It’s also tempting to wonder whether the cartel might have worked more effectively if the two players in it policed it by requiring garnets from each other as security not to undercut each other, alternating the benefit of the scarcity.)
If there is a season three, and I dearly hope there is, there’s one thing I’d like to see: I reckon it’s easier to develop a game that’s interesting to follow with perhaps 6-8 players than it is to develop one for 10+ (I wasn’t a fan of Food Chain, and felt like I was barely following Layoff at all) so I wouldn’t mind seeing only half the initial line-up play in week one and the other half of the line-up play in week two, all other things being equal.
It’s a great Idea to split the group in half, I think this would really make it more fun!
Not sure, not unless you mixed up the tribes every episode, there’s a real danger of something like the broadcaster’s alliance happening again which rather affected this series.
But If you had 14 guests, divided into two groups by their professions, a-group/-list being the celebrities/broadcasters and b-group/-list being the more or less unknown genius (whats the plural?), and you first show an episode of a, then b, then a, then b, you could have 10 people together in episode 5, who would either form 1) two big groups by the way they were divided before or 2) various groups divided by some of a-list people and b-list people forming an alliance. By showing the well known celebrities first, no one would be scared of the b-list-episode in the second week, so they would still get good ratings.
Do you think this is a good idea?
And does anyone know anything about the ratings this year? Are they still as great as they were last year?
I think Survivor has suggested it’s likely to be A.
From bits gleaned from behind the scenes interviews, it’s been rating well. I think a third series is likely.
Survivor with slightly more fun puzzles holds very little appeal for me. The social game would trump everything else. Games involving teams should make following what crowds are doing easier, by aligning a lot of player goals. Asking the audience to remember how player relationships developed a fortnight ago, times two groups, is no simpler a commitment than following a game of many participants. You also run the risk that one group turns out to have a less interesting cast and audiences tune out.
The problem with this season is that with all the guest stars, it doesn’t feel like the actual group has gotten any smaller. Last season the latter main matches were generally the better ones, and a lot of it had to do with the smaller cast, but this season there’s been so many episodes with non-contestant players that we haven’t been able to get to that point.
I’m not sure that’s *quite* true, last year featured bonus people to make up numbers for when there were two three and four players left and featured returnees for a death match slightly earlier. This one has had extra people for five player episodes downwards. It’s certainly a show that quite likes having a sizable amount of bodies and I’m not sure that’s a bad thing really.
Episode 11 likely coming very soon so here’s some spoiler space:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Off you go!
Heads up! While B has not yet Tweeted about this, the Torrent for Ep 11 is already available at the usual location, which I’m obviously not going to link to. Given that there are already a couple of dozen seeders I’m guessing it’s been up there for a couple of hours. I guess that this principle will apply in future weeks as well and it might be worth checking the usual location from a couple of hours after the “coming soon” Tweet comes out, i.e. before it has finished uploading to the other usual locations and before they have finished processing it.
Great main game, and having them put point spaces on the board was an interesting way to decide who would go to the finals automatically is a very good idea (and putting them at the top of up areas and the bottom on down areas seemed to be the best strategy )I was thinking more of who would have pressed their button to move most often, but this was probably better in the long run.
Nice incentive for the eliminated players too- with them taking the last 20 million, the winner is going to get less than last season (62 mill vs 79 mill). I do hope the finals go the limit though- when it’s 2 out of 3 and there’s a lot of stuff before the start of game 1, you know whoever won game 1 will win game 2.
The keyword of this episode is simple:
Game theory
And this is by far my most favorite episode of all time. (Of S2 of course.)
It is a shame that Junghyun still fail to think at least 2 steps ahead, even though it’s the semi final.
At the beginning, I was disappointing by the eliminated vs survivor, but they got my mercy when the show the “aha” moment.
And the final death match. You just love it.
For the final, I will put my money on Yohwan. Some say he doesn’t have the “killer instinct.” I don’t agree with it.
Knowing that the final will once again be three deathmatch-style games, we have to look at everyone’s track record at deathmatches:
Yohwan: 100% wins.
Sangmin: 100% losses. He only went to the deathmatch once in season 1, where he lost, and hasn’t seen a deathmatch this season. (I think, someone correct me if I’m wrong)
If it was down to who deserves to win then it’s Sangmin. Sure, he’s had some lucky breaks, but he’s basically been right at the heart of all the games he’s won, playing a teriffic proactive social game but still working out the solutions to most of the puzzles on offer.
But yes, as the final games tend to be head to head mental agility challenges Yohwan has a look in. I think the series would be poorer for his victory mainly barely surviving rather than looking like a genius (although I fully accept the argument that in making the final he has just as much of a right to win it as Sangmin).
My money’s also on Yohwan to win. The general pattern I’ve observed is, Sangmin has the advantage when it comes to politics and alliances, but Yohwan is much better at game theoretic battles of wits and pure strategy, which I consider to be the reason why Sangmin tends to dominate the Main Matches but Yohwan’s true skill comes out in the Death Matches. And if last season’s final was any indication, the final will most likely be Death Match-style battles of wits and tactics.
I agree with Lewis, this was the best episode of this season!
Though it wasn’t my favourite death match, it was great as Yohwan was playing it exactly the way he had to! Still, without knowing your opponent, I can’t figure out a strategy, can anybody help me with that?
And I also think Yohwan will win. But I think by the way they edited it, that they will only play two games. This is quiet annoying as the first one to win a game will win this series, if I saw it right.
I also don’t like that they are playing best of 3 in the finals again. You will probably (if I should be wrong) again easily realise by the amount of time passing by, who will win the show.
It was the best episode yet anyway and I like that we had a bit of a “Jinho vs. Yohwan Showdown” in the end. That was a real “Genius Game Moment”.
Obviously I agree with everyone who has commented on this episode yet, I just didn’t see all the comments somehow…
Mmm. Definitely one of the better ones. I hope we never see Tactical Yutonori again as it does feel very much obviated by the Elevator Game.
Had I been one of the Genius team, I’d have been very tempted to get together with the three revenge team members and say “right, let us win and let me get through to the final, and I’ll give each of the three of you three garnets each, because you surely prefer 3 million for each of you to 2 million for each of you and also the other seven”. Not sure it would have worked – can garnets be given to an eliminated player? – but the alternative form of bribery would be “if you give our team the win, me the win on our team and then I go on to win the final, 3 million cash each…”, which is really long-winded.
The game per se was pretty decent, although once again the playing of it wasn’t exactly brilliant. I had big trouble with the use of returning players though. The actual players were handed a Kobayashi Maru, so not exactly an exciting outcome. Worse, minimizing their losses meant prostration to the celebs who were nastily dispatched in prior episodes. Production may have felt an apology of sorts was required, but watching the surviving players dance stupidly and pound their heads in supplication is closer to appalling than palliative.
Deathmatch is meh by nature, although the framing of the result as a metagaming triumph, rather than with the usual mind-reading pablum was a marked improvement.
I just wondered whether the people will mainly help Sangmin or Yohwan and I don’t know really. I think some might be angry that Sangmin has always been immune while they faced the death matches, but he was part of the broadcaster alliance that always worked. On the other hand Yohwan didn’t really play the way he said he would, making the other people angry, but he was a nice person all in all.
I really have no idea…
A return to form for The Genius. Great stuff!
I expect the grand final will be incoming very soon so…
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
Away you go!
Thanks, Ron Pickering.
************************* SPOILER ALERT *********************
My review:
First few minutes: When I saw Quatro on the rotation, I screamed on the monitor. What the!?
First game: Hold Em Indian Poker
I love this game. It has a nice “Aha” moment. I knew it from the beginning it will be Yohwan
Second Game: Truth Detector
I sincerely like this game better then “Hap! Gyul!” Because it breaks the last season “Brightest brain wins” tradition. This game is nice because it has also a “Aha” moment.
Third Game: Quatro!
Funnily, this game came up on the final list. I still think this is the best final ever, despite this name appear on the rotation. However, the environment of this challenge make it more like “May the luckiest win.” I wont say that this game kill the moment. (This game doesn’t kill the moment at all. I enjoy the game presence), however, I would like to tweak it a little bit.
Rate: 9.5/10 (Just the Quatro!)
First time to comment in here, I think the final games relies to much on luck. Even though they have changed the Quatro game by not allowing the players and the guests to talk or have a plan on how to give signals by isolating them. I’m starting to have doubts if the show is scripted and if it’s not wow they impress me with their wit and alliances. Overall I enjoyed the two seasons. I have always looked for shows like Liar game, Kaiji, Deathnote etc. any thing that involves mind games and tricks.
What bothers me is that they haven’t shown a preview of Season 3. Don’t they have good ratings this season? If someone knows please do reply. Thanks
Whilst I can’t claim to be an expert, I would have thought that the fact that the channel is backing the players with other projects suggests it was doing well.
Since when do reality game shows have previews for the next season? O_o How can they have a preview if they don’t even know the cast yet?
Did you watch the last episode of season 1? They have a preview of Noh Hong Chul opening the box with the invitation for the next season.
I could’ve sworn somewhere in the cast interviews that Bumdidlyumptious subbed before the first episode aired, there were a couple mentions that the cast of S2 wasn’t actually finalized for a long time even after some people had already signed on to play, which would imply that they did the promo with only Hongchul because most if not all the other players hadn’t signed on yet. Between that and the fact that Bandage Man ended the episode with “I will see you next time” as always, I suspect they want to make a third season but none of the contestants are for certain yet, which would explain the lack of a promo.
I thought that was a pretty good final and the best player from throughout the series won.
Truth detector managed to be interesting (oh that’s a different take on Mastermind), then boring (everyone playing procedually), then interesting again with Youwan’s intriguing play, which would have been hilarious if he pulled it off.
Quattro, great game first time, a bit odd to finish a series with, but still very tense. It’s interesting that Youwan couldn’t infer that Junghyun was likely to be mostly green when Sangmin didn’t trade with him after revealing his green ten.
An enjoyable final to an enjoyable series, albeit not as good as the first one I don’t think.
If Yohwan had inferred that, would he have picked Junghyun, knowing that he was on Sangmin’s side? If Yohwan were to assume he had, say, two greens and a low number of some other colour, then Sangmin still had no reason to trade with him early and he could have given the other colour to Yohwan.
Well as the other contestants said in their room, they would probably have helped anyone in the end because “it’s too mean” (in other words “I don’t want to seem like an a-hole to the audience”), so Yohwan could have tried at least.
Frankly, I’m shocked Quattro was the deciding game- I was sure that Black and White and Indian Holdem were going to be the 2 known games used….Truth Detector was interesting I thought. The best player won, which is fine- and I agree it wasn’t quite as good as Season 1; some of the games were weak.
I was really disappointed at Quattro’s use for the deciding game – it is far too luck-based. But otherwise, enjoyed the final immensely. A shame Yohwan fell to pieces during game 2, but Sangmin was definitely a deserving winner.
And huge, huge thanks to bumdidlyumptious for subtitling the entire series!
I was suprisingly happy with the final games.
I didn’t even remember quattro, though I liked it, but it was too luck based.
I thought that Yohwan has somehow shown that he deserved being there, I think he was not that good in the main part/match of any other episode.
There are just two things I didn’t like: a) no preview for season 3 though I’m sure it will happen.
b) Sangmin forgot to take his money with him. What a shame, he was playing 12 weeks to get it and then he just left it with the Dealer Nuna….
Quite liked the final, my thoughts on each individual game:
Indian Hold’Em: Absolutely brilliant, especially Yohwan’s card counting trick. I also loved how the editors foreshadowed it a bit by focusing on Yohwan’s left hand playing with his chips at several earlier points.
Truth Detector: In short, I agree with Brig. Interesting, then briefly boring, then Yohwan made it interesting again with his strategy. I was surprised neither player tried to use flat out binary search though. The problem with Sangmin’s strategy is that on the second question for each digit, he has to partition the digits unevenly, 2:3. If he’s unlucky, the digit could land on the side with 3 possibilities, forcing him to partition them 1:2 on the next question, again opening up the possibility that it’ll land on the side with 2 possibilities. Worst case scenario (40% chance per digit), he narrows down each digit 10 -> 5 -> 3 -> 2 -> 1, for 5 turns per digit, making his worst-case scenario 20 turns. Best case scenario, he narrows each digit down 10 -> 5 -> 2 or 3 -> 1, for 4 turns per digit and guesses right between the two possibilities for the last digit, for a win on turn 15. But with plain old binary search, he could narrow them down 5000 -> 2500 -> 1250 and so on; the worst-case scenario for that is 15 turns, which clearly dominates the strategy he used.
Quattro: I liked the fact that the very first Death Match returned to be the last game, but I thought the modified rules were a bit too luck-heavy, as many others have already pointed out. I do like the new zero card rule, since the nature of the game meant it was practically impossible for the zero to ever come into play under the old rules; a player would have to be backstabbed by the player he/she trusted the most AND that backstabbing player would have to be holding the zero prior to the last trade. Unfortunately, I think the new zero card rule also made the Forced 0 Card Trade item a bit overpowered, since as Yohwan pointed out a couple times, it’s nearly impossible not to form a quattro if you have it.
Sangmin both had luck, and made his own luck throughout the series… a fine winner indeed.
Indian Poker… I honestly have no idea how Yohwan managed to win that. He spent the first round being a calling station, then spent the second folding to just about everything. And then for some reason Sangmin gave it away on the last hand… I guess assuming that Yohwan wasn’t card counting?
Truth Detector: I suspect this could be played more psychological than they played it. They spent a lot of time telling us that the response to the question couldn’t be evasive or impossible, but none at all about the restrictions on the questioner. I’d think you could ask a really hard question, hope for a mistake, and then you get the answer you want PLUS the bonus of eliminating a number from the combination. Barring that, there has to be a way to ask a useful question that isn’t just a binary search. Something like:
“What combination is incorrect?”
“Is your 4-digit combination a prime number?”
“What is not the largest number not in your combination?”
“True or false: this sentence is false.”
“When did you stop beating your wife?”
Quattro is a game that has no business working on the show, but somehow it comes across OK. The last card flip should not be as dramatic as it is. I think with the three card trader hands and the three trade limit it’s way too easy to get screwed by the shuffle (e.g. the all green hand).
In total, I would say I’m quite pleased with S2. The Doohee episode itself was worth the price of admission. Food Chain was a great group game. The games down the stretch had a lot of interesting strategy (especially Tactical Chutes and Ladders/Snakes and Ladders). The deathmatches, as a whole, were much better than the corresponding set from S1, though I think this season sorely needed a good assistant game like Tactical Yutnori. And I think the cast managed to end up pretty solid, despite the loss of some potential characters early. Please please season 3 thank you very much.
INTERESTING. You may have solved the game there. Given that you can’t rely with an impossible answer, I can’t see how you could get out of that ‘incorrect’ question of yours.
And yes, it’s a shame that the idea of asking hard questions was mentioned but no one went for it.
That’s roughly what I was thinking during the broadcast too.
The last question cannot be answered in yes/no fashion, so it’s out, and there’s no reason to believe that naive logic paradoxes are to be construed as always incorrectly answered than as always correctly answered.
Binary search is unbeatable as a pure search strategy, so improving on that requires tripping the truth detector. Since nobody is going to do that on purpose, it requires questions whose answers are unknowable to your opponent, but easily verifiable by a PA with access to Google.
Optimally, the questions should split the remaining password candidate pool in half (so binary search benefits still apply), but rely on utterly obscure trivia that you just happen to know. Thus, if opponent is lucky, answering it leaves 50% of the candidates, and if he’s not it drops to as low as 5% of them.
Assuming the producers don’t freak out entirely and kill this approach offscreen, which is entirely possible, contestants could ask each other things like:
-Is your password a room number in the Seoul Hilton?
– Is your password greater than the product of the Gregorian year of the Vindex revolt multiplied by the seats of the Mongolian Assembly divided by the number of Formula One races won by Olivier Panis?
or even, if they’re feeling particularly unsporting,
– Does the street number of my home and the password share digits?
At which point the game degenerates back into a dull procession determined exclusively by turn order and related bonuses.
Regarding no-one deliberately tripping the truth detector: isn’t it worth tripping the detector if revealing one digit reveals less information than giving a correct answer, although I’m not quite sure if they outlined exactly how the penalty would play out (Could you always reveal the same digit? Are you required to reveal position or only value?).
The reason why that might potentially be relevant is – consider the example of “Name an incorrect combination”. Far better to reveal a random incorrect number and give up one digit than give away the right answer immediately. If you’re dealing with questions where there are multiple potential lying answers, the lie does not neccesarily give the opponent much information about the truth.
I think, anyway. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out metastrategies and I’m not sure how solid they are without information about how the penalty is arranged.
For the record, there was one restriction placed on questions: all questions must be related to the password. So no logical paradoxes and no wife-beating here.
Maybe the Korean language works differently, but I’m surprised Yohwan didn’t say just a straight “yes” to one of the odd or even questions, then use his item when the detector went off. All it does it stall Sangmin for a turn, but that’s about all the use I can find for that particular item.
Good point about the item, but didn’t Sangmin have an Item Cancel item that would’ve negated that anyway?
First of all, thanks to Bumdidlyumptious for allowing us non-Koreans to follow the series.
On to the games:
This is the first “Indian” match I actually enjoyed. I was disappointed neither contestant engaged in full-on card counting. Yowhan’s unit tracking and the change community cards bonus do not mix well, and I wonder if he realised it. I would have been happier if the bonus chips were cashable at any time, allowing for a sneaky use after going all-in, but before you are judged as out of the game. I was surprised it went that way, though, given their backgrounds, I should have seen it coming.
Truth detector is, bar none, the worst game in any series. A game whose optimal strategy is as well-known (binary search, as one of the celebs -Doohee?- mentioned) as it is dull to watch. And since it is an entirely symmetrical game, winning depends exclusively on turn order and related bonuses. I suppose one could go for forcing sensor tripping in the manner discussed above, but that just accelerates the game without solving any of its problems. Not that this level of skill was in display: Sangmin’s approach missed the trick we discuss and wasn’t quite optimal even so, and Yowhan … well, we should thank him for making an amusing mess of the game with his in(s)ane approach.
I suppose it would have been salvageable if the truth detector was both more forgiving and more unpredictable. For example, you are notified of the first opponent’s truth a random 0-4 turns after it occurred, his second 0-3 turns after, and so forth, with multiple notifications assigned at the same time to be indistinguishable from a single one.
Quatro is a game I wanted to see more of, and it makes a perfect companion to Sun-Moon-Star in the complex popularity contests that are the early deathmatches. Maybe the broadcaster alliance meant they couldn’t play it again during normal rounds, but it feels odd to use it in the finals, when a) you’ve already had a card game, and b) You’ve built a giant bloody Khet set already! Contestants didn’t really seem to be in control at all, which is not the final impression you want to leave out on.
I can see ways to make it suitable for a deathmatch, mostly by including things that allow for more partial information to leak, allowing pairs of non-contestants to trade cards, or giving non-contestants their own money-worthy objectives, but that’s not what we got.
Overall, I’m quite happy with the result. Sangmin may have lucked in on a lot of his advantages, but he did display a lot of skill in keeping himself top dog. I have been quite unhappy with the final five or so, who seemed to just not be skilled enough for the game to be as fun as it could. Part of that was casting, but part of that was like late episodes of The Weakest Link, where the weak were protected because they were the easiest to beat in a final. That show realised the problem, which is why the final scoring round was worth triple. In the same vein, I wonder if announcing up front that the final will contain a brief co-operative game to the tune of 20-25 garnets will give some players pause. It’s not like we can’t do without reviews of the previous episode and ten minutes of dramatically-lit staring.
Far as the series goes, I did find it hugely enjoyable, and would certainly watch a third season. May they use their time till fall to pore over boardgamegeek and econ textbooks, and actually think their casting through this time.
I think you underestimate Truth Detector.
If both players use binary search, then binary search is absolutely *not* then the best strategy.
With binary search, the player who is behind is *guaranteed* to lose. And so they must take a more risky strategy to overtake. Players recognise this intuitively, which means the game is always going to be interesting.
Yohwan’s strategy was approximately correct in this respect: he knew he would lose in a small number of turns, and had to guess before he was sure.
Assuming no detector-tripping questions and two binary searchers, the player who is behind has a smaller but significant chance of winning, which depends on the way the cookie crumbles near the end (whether somebody ends with two or three possibilities). If you are behind just by turn order, this can be a 35% chance. That’s nothing to sneeze at, although this drops rapidly if you are further behind.
Binary search is mathematically proven to be both worst-case and average-case optimal. Google will throw proofs at you from fifteen different angles. Since you’re not even guessing passwords till your 13th question, it is clear other strategies have better best-case optimality. Simple guessing for example has a best-case of a single turn.”The password is 5839″ could be accurate, but your best-case odds are 0.01%. But on average, this approach would require 5000.5 turns, and has a worst case of 10000. The more you try to tilt the question so that it includes a smaller, more useful pool of candidates, the greater the odds that the answer would lie on the larger and more awkward complement to the piece you’d have liked to contain the answer. And that leaves you on average worse off.
And Yowhan’s strategy was as awful as it looked. At the point he lost, he had four different digits but knew nothing of their order, which means he still had to discern between 10 possibilities. That’s 3 to 5 turns behind!
What a wonderful series. Some great episodes – a great winner and most of all a fantastic cast of personalities. Hongchul made this series for me, he was absolutely wonderful to watch.
The best gameshow on the planet.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I’m going to chime in here and say that a good tactic for Truth Detector would be to ask very difficult questions, as a couple of people have mentioned. Questions such as: Is your password bigger than my password, Is your last number bigger than my first?
Whilst that would risk revealing some of your own info, if they guess wrong they have to reveal a number. If they guess right at least you have some info.
Personally, if done well, I think that’s a quicker way to getting to the passwords than a binary search.
Truth detector activation, even if successful every third try, beats the hell out of binary search with no activation. But you don’t have to choose. Questions exist that will work fine for both purposes at once.
Using your password as a source of unknowable trivia is downright brilliant if and only if general trivia is disallowed. Answers to questions relying on your password provide information to both parties, so it’s a costly option. However, getting a digit is so much more constraining than the expected candidate split that it is surely worth it if you can’t, or are not allowed to, form obscure trivia-based questions.
I have thought up of another way to get around possible trivia restrictions, but it is even more obnoxious in that it takes time and mathematical skill to set up before each question so that it is useful, and in that it relies on overloading your opponent’s short term memory. In the simplest form, the questioner quickly rattles off a series of a couple of hundred digits, then asks if the password can be found in there in a specified manner, the simplest of which is in sequence.
I think I found a optimal strategy
Q1. Is there any repetitive number.
Q2. Is the number are in range of 6!-1 and 7!+1 (This is the trick question)
Q3. Is the first digit odd or even
Q4. Is the second digit odd or even
Q5. Is the third digit odd or even
Q6. Is the fourth digit odd or even.
Q3. Can you give me 4 digits, with at least 1 of the 4 digits appear does not appear on the password.
With question 7, your opponent must tell all 4 digits on the password (since giving an answer with digit not on the password on will turn on the truth detector.)
Then I can deduce the number using parameters given from Q2-Q6.
If my opponent refuse and voluntarily make true statement, I can start eliminating answer with parameters for Q2-Q6.
For Sangmin’s Password :1892
If Sangmin follow my question #7 , I will come out with 2 guess remaining.
1298 and 1829.
(You may asked, why I don’t put 9XXX in this possible combination? Because due to Q2. Sangmin number is between 6!-1 (719) and 7!+1 (5041)
That’s how you play Genius Game!
* typo:The possible solution is 1892 and 1298
If you’re allowed to ask something like question 7, then I have an even better question 1:
Can you give me a 4-digit number that isn’t your password?
Of course, the smart thing to do when asked this or your Q7 is to actually just let the truth detector go off. Giving away one digit not in your password is a far lower information loss than giving up all 4 digits of the password.
That is true, but there are no rule about repeating the question 🙂
Your question 1 however, will still left us with 12 possibilities (If my math is right)
Nope, my question is essentially “what’s your password” not “what are the four digits”
I do wonder how repeat hits of the truth detector work. Do you have to give different digits each time? (probably) Do the dealers/bandage man reveal info on your behalf? I can’t see you just saying the same digit over and over.
That strategy sound good enough. I believe you must tell different number, but you got to say it on your behalf. (As the illustration)
I continue to love this show to an extent that I love no other show airing in the last few years, bar none. There have been episodes that I haven’t especially liked or enjoyed and that doesn’t matter so long as the high points are as high as they have proved they can be.
Final episode worked well for me, even bearing in mind the degree of randomness in Quatro. Truth Detector is something I liked at the time and have thoroughly enjoyed seeing the discussion here. I wonder if part of the way that the show is made is that games are repeated until someone does find the way to “crack” them, simply because the show is at its best when we see people actually displaying their genius by beating the system.
Immense thanks to B. for the translations and dissemination. I’m working on a way of showing some appreciation.
… Not many rule breakers this time out, n’est-ce pas?
That was a joke quibble! My love for this show is unconditional. Though the overall level of games was, I think, higher in season 1, the game play on display was generally marvelous (for entertainment benefit) and I think I liked the characters even more. To wit, Jinho and Sangmin became even more fully developed. The show benefitted hugely from the addition of Jiwon, Yunsoon, Yooyoung, and most of all Junghyun and Hongchul. Memorable players all.
The addition of the token of immortality (and its doppleganger) also amped up the drama in way I enjoyed immensely. There were scores of penny-drop moments, and lots of exciting TV, which is really what I’m in it for.
If I were forced to stop watching after Food Chain, I would still feel like I got my money’s worth. Add to that Minus Auction (I’ve never played No Thanks, so this was all new to me), the Elevator Game, Junghyun’s game-breaking strategy of Same Picture Hunt, and Sangmin’s breakthrough during God’s Judgement… there was just so much here to love.
The only thing that could possibly have enhanced my happiness from watching this show is finding an English language forum with fellow fans to share my joy with. Thank you all for being part of this community. Let’s do it again season 3.
The advantage of living in a suburb next to New Malden (which has the most Koreans living in it outside of Korea) is there are many Korean supermarkets and restaurants.
Well… I can confirm that, in a supermarket’s anniversary raffle, I’ve just won two rolls of kitchen roll branded with CJ Group, the parent company of the producers of The Genius*
Can you beat that? I think not.
*Namely CJ Group, a strangely wide-ranging parent company which includes a food service division (hence the kitchen roll) as well as TV company CJ-E&M who make the show.
Congratulations!
If you noticed any Genius chat about chaebol, this is an example of a chaebol: huge family-owned businesses which control much of Korea’s industry.
CJ Group started out as a subsidiary of Samsung and now they’re apparently in a huff with each other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJ_Group#Family_feud