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VISUAL TWENTY QUESTIONS

Everybody’s familiar with the old parlor game of "Twenty Questions." One player starts out announcing whether the thing he is thinking of is "animal, vegetable, or mineral," and the other player may ask up to twenty yes-no questions to figure out the identity of the thing the first player has in mind.
In this version, one player silently selects an object from the grid, and the other player asks yes-no questions until he identifies the object. Then you switch roles, and the player who needs the fewest questions to get the answer wins.
This game uses left-brain categorization skills (as implied by a question such as, "Is it a man-made object?"), short-term memory skills (to keep track of what you’ve already asked), logical thinking skills (to understand, for example, that the answer to "Is it a tool?" may eliminate the need to ask, "Is it a man-made object?"), and planning and organizational skills.

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STARTERS
The most simple-minded strategy would be to ask, for each object in turn, "Is it the bee?" etc. For 42 squares, you’d stand only a 50-50 chance of getting the answer in 21 questions, and you might need as many as 41 questions. A better approach would be to start out with what psychologists call constraint-seeking questions to narrow down the possibilities, and then ask more specific questions to test your emerging hypothesis. A good constraint-seeking question might be, "is it bigger than my head?" or, "Is it a man-made object?" A bad one (what psychologists call pseudo-constraint-seeking, since it doesn’t really reduce alternatives) would be, for example, "Does it have inch marks on it?"
Note, by the way, that you could take a right-brain approach to this game and apply a purely spatial strategy: "Is it in the right top half of the grid?" followed by, "Is it in the bottom four rows of the bottom half?" and so on until you’ve identified the correct square. With this method, for a 42-square grid, you’d never need more than six questions.

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