Pearce et al. (1) have made a bold and challenging attempt to provide a quantitative estimate for the accumulation of nucleobases, like adenine, on the Hadean Earth some 4 billion y ago, before life began. Why bold? There must have been a source of organic compounds for life to begin, and they chose an extraterrestrial source—carbonaceous meteorites—rather than the geochemical source more commo...

The ability of intelligent agents to play games in human-like fashion is popularly considered a benchmark of progress in Artificial Intelligence. Similarly, performance on multi-disciplinary tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA) is considered a marker for gauging progress in Computer Vision. In our work, we bring games and VQA together. Specifically, we introduce the first computational...

Guess Who?” is a popular two player game where players ask “Yes”/“No” questions to search for their opponent’s secret identity from a pool of possible candidates. This is modeled as a simple stochastic game. Using this model, the optimal strategy is explicitly found. Contrary to popular belief, performing a binary search is not always optimal. Instead, the optimal strategy for the player who tr...