alt Hacker NewsYou're mixing two different objectives the paper presents. You can't beat binary search when the objective is to minimise the expected number of turns in a single player setting.
However, in a two player setting, using the strategies presented in the paper, you will beat an adversary that uses binary search in more than 50% of the games played.
Here's another visual demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmvn4dnq82U
What do you think you're saying that I didn't already say?
> in a two player setting, using the strategies presented in the paper, you will beat an adversary that uses binary search in more than 50% of the games played.
This is technically true. But 50 percentage points of your "more than 50%" of games played are games where you exclusively use binary search. For the remainder, you're redistributing luck around between potential games in a way that is negative-sum, exactly like I just said.