I just wrote an application for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in which you must guess the holiday themes connecting various people. The people are revealed day-by-day as an advent calendar.
OUP deliberately didn’t give me the answers so I could figure it out myself (but obviously I did have access to all the identities at once). So beat my score:
- Competition 1 (red): Got it after 4 people
- Competition 2 (green): Got the trick in 2, the answer in 4
- Competition 3 (blue): Tried for 30 minutes to get it in 2, eventually got it in 4
So, three or better, people. You’ll just have to keep checking the page.
(For the curious, this is a single JSP page which loads an XML data file and some XSLT. Java tells XSLT whether today is before, during or after December, because XSLT 1.0 has no date handling and my EXSLT implementation was limited. This way the XSLT only needs to worry about the day value in December, which it can treat as a plain integer, and compute which doors are open accordingly.)