Quick question

**system28** · 18.03.15, 11:03

If I have to guess how old you are...well...compared with the quality/knowledge of/in your posts: You are around 30. Right?

**zora** · 18.03.15, 14:35

I'm 20 years old... (turning 21 in may)

**tr-cht-fx-242p** · 18.03.15, 15:46

lets play a guessing game.

the digits of the year month and day of my birthday are 1235589

how many permutations are there?
but the idea is to guess my birthday.

maybe this won't be fun

**anon** · 18.03.15, 17:30

Originally Posted by zora

I'm 20 years old... (turning 21 in may)

You win. Case closed

Originally Posted by tr-cht-fx-242p

lets play a guessing game.

the digits of the year month and day of my birthday are 1235589

how many permutations are there?

Last week, I had to deal with a laptop whose security system claimed would get locked in 01/32/9099. So I don't trust things like date formats anymore

**Sazzy** · 18.03.15, 19:22

May 23rd, 1985 ?

**zora** · 18.03.15, 19:31

Originally Posted by tr-cht-fx-242p

lets play a guessing game.

the digits of the year month and day of my birthday are 1235589

how many permutations are there?
but the idea is to guess my birthday.

maybe this won't be fun

I feel like I can get pretty close on logic alone.

First of all I can pretty much guarantee that you were born in the 1900s so there's two numbers taken away.
Year: 19XX
Numbers left: 23558

Next, you are a coder, there is a very slim chance that you were born in the 20s or 30s and you know how to code. The 50s is also kinda slim. So I'm gonna go with the 80s as the decade you were born in.

Year: 198X
Numbers left: 2355

Now is where it starts getting really tricky. There are 30 days in month so the date of your birth is in the single digits or in the 20s. The current options for the date are 2, 3, 5, 23, 25. HOWEVER, there are also 12 months in a year so that means for the month you were born in can only be 2,3, or 5.

To get rid of all the numbers the date of your birth must be in the double digits because there month has to be in the single digits. Therefore, the Date options are currents 23 or 25. So we can get rid of the 2.

Year: 198X
Day: 2X
Numbers left: 355

At this point it becomes all guess work. If the date is 23, the month is 5 and year is 1985.
If the date is 25, the month can be 3 or 5 and year the the opposite of 3 and 5.

I have therefore narrowed it down to 3 options.

1) May (5) 23, 1985
2) May (5) 25, 1983
3) March (3) 25, 1985

At this point all I'm really left with is guessing.... Unless someone can think of a way to logic this down even further.... But I'm going with option #1 May 23, 1985. I got a 33% chance of being right which I guess is good enough.

**tr-cht-fx-242p** · 20.03.15, 17:45

I'll have to make it more difficult the next time. But what surprises

me the most is that with just the two of you guessing you both got the month and day correct too. I don't see how that was possible and why so easy to decipher. Sazzy indicates a guess by pure intuition and zora a logical method (like I would have used), as a coder would. But either way produced a correct result. What goes on here? Here we have the benefits of human mind's power over digital logic. Computer algorithm would result in a statistical result and "black box" method whereas the human brain involves many delicate factors and somehow like magic calculates the correct result the first guess in two separate cases.