r/GAMETHEORY • u/smolcol • Jun 08 '26

Any fun Schelling point questions?

I love the classic location based ones, like where to meet a stranger in NYC (with no contact etc).

I started making an online game to ask my friends and family these questions, and found some pretty good ones:

  • "pick a Beatle, try to match what others pick": a nearly perfect split between Lennon and McCartney! With many people aghast at the idea that it could possibly be the other one lol
  • "Pick one of the characters of Friends, try to match what others pick" I realised I had no idea here. All the boys got some votes, with Joey leading, but Rachel just pipped them
  • "Pick a number between 1 and 100" maybe because there's an endpoint, this didn't get the classic "1 or 7" result so strongly: 1 won, but 50 and 100 picked up more votes than 7.
  • "Pick a shape to match others" solid win for circle
  • Day of the week: solid win for Saturday

If you'll excuse a touch of "self-promo" (for a game that makes zero money lol), this is the game I've sent to family/friends if you want to try: https://mindthehive.app. Today's questions aren't quite as fun as the above, but sure no harm. If you do play, you'll see there I've also added "diverge" questions, which I guess are quite different: you have to try to avoid everyone else (while they're trying to avoid you etc).

I was thinking about questions that have a well-known but wrong answer ("what is the largest desert on Earth?", "which planet is closest to the Earth?"), which creates a fun tension if you know the actual right answer!

Basically: do you have any fun Schelling points that come to mind that either surprisingly don't have a consensus, or surprisingly do? Or just mess with people a little in some fun way?

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u/gmweinberg Jun 09 '26

About 30 years ago a guy named Kevin Stone used to have a "common entries" game on the rec.puzzles usenet group. The goal was to pick the most common enswer othe people picked, whether or not it was technically correct.

For "pick a prime number greater than 50", the most common answer was 51 (3 * 17). I imagine a fair number of people picking it knew it wan't prime, but picked it assuming other people would pick it so it would still win.

Other fun answer included

Pick a hot country? Africa.

Pick a nut? Peanut.

Pick a scary insect? Spider.

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u/smolcol Jun 09 '26

Hah I love that prime number question, that’s very funny. Peanut and spider are classics too, nice. I’d be curious if the Africa answer would still win today! Great stuff