Playing log(N)-Questions over Wikipedia Abstracts: How Per-Round Errors Compound Under Information Asymmetry
We evaluate six frontier language models on the two-agent $\log_2 N$-Questions game (Potash et al., 2019) to measure self-communication across an information asymmetry. A questioner with access to $N$ candidate Wikipedia lead paragraphs ($N = 4$ to $1024$) must identify a secret target using exactly $\log_2 N$ binary questions answered by an agent from the same provider that sees only the target. Across 408 games, win rate decays cleanly as a geometric power of horizon length, $p^{\log_2 N}$ ($p \approx 0.93$). Per-round failure rates are flat across the horizon, indicating that errors compound because more rounds must succeed rather than because individual rounds grow harder. Adjudicatio...
| Authors | Peter Potash |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 22 September 2026 |
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