God's Imitator

From the very beginning, Cai Zhiyuan had considered that ’minority answer’ might be an additional reward factor.

Because ’numbers’ was a key variable in similar games.

The question was, would it be the ’majority’ that received extra rewards, or would it be the ’minority’ that received extra rewards.

It might seem like a 50-50 possibility, but considering it from the designer’s logic, it was most likely that the minority received rewards.

If it were ’majority answer receives rewards’, this would inevitably trigger players’ herd mentality and clustering. Combined with the rule of ’extra rewards when all five choose the same answer’, the game dynamics between players would be greatly reduced.

Because players with different options would only cluster together, not avoid each other.

The game’s playability and strategic nature would be greatly damaged.

At the same time, the question setter’s and players’ earnings were negatively correlated. The more players earned, the more the question setter lost.

The setting of ’minority receives extra rewards’ better aligned with game design logic.

Of course, these were all just preliminary inferences. Whether they actually held true needed to be further verified through specific questions.For the first question, the reason Cai Zhiyuan chose C was because he guessed Kong Yuxin’s strategy and was quite certain this was the correct answer.

Actually, if he wanted to definitely become the minority, the best choice for this question would have been A.

But Cai Zhiyuan still chose C. This was because he wasn’t certain whether he could choose the correct answer for the second question, so he needed to conduct a comparison test.

For the second question, the reason Cai Zhiyuan chose B was because this was the majority option of the uninvolved community players.

This choice had an element of gambling, but it also had basis.

Cai Zhiyuan’s judgment was that for questions where the differences between options weren’t apparent, the uninvolved community players’ correct answer rate might actually be higher.

Because for those seemingly ambiguous questions, community players were very likely to answer based on their first impression, and unlikely to specifically ask professionals within their community.

Because whether they answered correctly or incorrectly had absolutely no bearing on their interests.

But the second question involved linguistics, which the vast majority of players didn’t know. So if they were purely guessing based on first impressions, the proportions for the three options should be roughly similar.

And for such questions, many players would instead ask the very few players with professional knowledge out of curiosity.

This way, the suggestions from the minority of players who knew the correct answer were more likely to be widely adopted, producing slight differences in the proportions among the three options.

At the same time, ’player representative’ Gao Jialiang’s suggestion was C. By choosing B, Cai Zhiyuan could also avoid that and become the minority to obtain extra earnings.

Through these two questions, Cai Zhiyuan roughly confirmed that: ’minority answer’ + ’correct answer’ would receive a reward of 7000 minutes of visa time.

Additionally, the different total earnings for the first and second questions could also roughly deduce other players’ options.

The first question’s total earnings were -7000. Kong Yuxin and Cai Zhiyuan should have chosen the same option. The two of them earned +7000, so the other three people might have each lost -7000.

The second question’s total earnings were -11000. The four people besides Cai Zhiyuan had earnings of -18000, which could possibly be three at -7000 and one at +3000, or two at -7000 and two at -2000.

Of course, there were many other possibilities for these two questions, but listing every situation would be too complex. Cai Zhiyuan could only consider the most likely options.

In any case, there shouldn’t have been a second player who gained 7000 earnings from the second question, otherwise there wouldn’t have been such a high loss.

By the third question, more and more players were actually realizing that ’minority answer’ would receive earnings.

For example, the second question very likely had a player who gained 3000 earnings, and they would inevitably realize this point.

And the third question happened to be one with a quite clear answer.

All five people knew the correct answer was B, but apparently only 2 people actually chose option B.

But the difference among the other three players was that, at this point, besides Cai Zhiyuan, the other 2 players still couldn’t clearly judge exactly how many players would deliberately choose the minority option.

’Only I will deliberately choose the minority’ versus ’at least 2 to 3 players will deliberately choose the minority’ would directly affect players’ judgment of the minority option.

Between options A and C, the uninvolved players’ choices were: option A 11%, option C 14%.

So the other 2 players happened to both choose option A with the lower proportion, resulting in a collision.

Of course, Cai Zhiyuan being able to obtain such high earnings had a large element of luck.

But because he grasped the information gap, even in situations with worse luck, he could still maintain positive earnings.

He just wouldn’t necessarily earn this much.

Although Yang Hui exposed this rule, returning all players to the starting line, the earnings from the first three questions were already enough to give Cai Zhiyuan a considerable advantage.

...

Beyond this, Cai Zhiyuan had also roughly confirmed that these five questions weren’t matched positions. Gao Jialiang really shouldn’t have known the answer to the second question.

This was actually a small trap deliberately created by the God’s Imitator who designed this game.

These three questions all appeared to be professional questions, and Kong Yuxin’s and Yang Hui’s answers indeed easily created the illusion that ’the questions were custom-made for them’.

But careful thought would reveal that these three questions had obvious differences in difficulty.

The first question was medium difficulty, the third question was very simple, while the second question was very difficult.

The first and third questions actually leaned more toward common knowledge. Even players from unrelated professions could roughly explain the reasoning, creating an illusion.

This made the ’player representative’ for the second question seem to be deliberately pretending not to know, further destroying mutual trust among players.

However, considering the logic of game design, the assumption of ”five questions being matched positions” was very difficult to establish.

Because this game had a total of 25 players in 5 rooms. If ”matched position” questions were to be designed, it would mean the God’s Imitator had to produce 25 professional questions, and forcibly customize everything from player selection to room allocation.

But this game had specific filtering rules when selecting players. Which specific players entered the game couldn’t be predicted by the God’s Imitator who designed it.

And they had absolutely no need to do so, because it wouldn’t bring them any extra earnings.

Just like opening a casino, the house only needed to set roughly fair rules and take a cut. There was no need to set up personalized gambling games for each gambler.

After all, this was a distribution-type game with multiple participants, not a judgment-type game.

So considering this point, the next two questions were very likely to change.

It might even involve completely different question-answering logic.

...

All players were already prepared to try their best to choose the minority answer.

Of course, everyone also understood that they could only exploit the information gap to stably increase the probability of selecting the minority answer before this rule was exposed.

Once it was exposed, players’ thinking would gradually become multi-layered, and at that point whether one could choose the minority answer would purely depend on luck.

But even so, they could only grit their teeth and continue playing.

However, the fourth question that appeared on the large screen made all the players show surprised expressions on their faces, and also made their previously planned strategies no longer valid.

Because it was no longer a professional question.

[Is your gender the majority among players in this game?]

[A. Yes]

[B. No]

[C. I don’t know]