TL;DR
Optimal Twenty Questions with Biased Priors: A canonical quantitative trading interview question at foundation difficulty. Commonly asked at Jane Street, SIG, Two Sigma.
By Valenke Exam Prep Team·Last updated 2026-06-01
foundationInformation & Entropy
Optimal Twenty Questions with Biased Priors
Asked at: Jane Street, SIG, Two Sigma
Problem
You are playing 20 questions to identify a number from . If the prior is uniform, binary search is optimal ( questions). But if you know the number is with probability 0.9 and uniformly distributed on otherwise, what strategy minimizes expected questions?
Related concepts
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