The "victim" is restrained. The top has a note pad and pen. The topguy explains to the bottom that he is going to write one of three words on the pad each time--either "see", "say" or "so". The bottom has to correctly guess which word was written six times in order to be released (or whatever reward is decided). Simple?
 

The penalty for the first wrong guess is two minutes of tickling. Each successive wrong guess adds another minute to that guess's penalty. If you've had a little experience with probability and statistics you can calculate the odds of how many guesses it will take your playbuddy to come up with six correct guesses. Suffice to say that the matrix is large enough that you and he will have plenty of tickling time, and depending on his endurance you may have to set a ceiling on the number of tickle-minutes (or maybe not...).

I'm gonna try this one out on one of my playbuddies at our next session.

Well, he HAS been saying he wanted to improve his endurance...
 

Joe
vetteguy@earthlink.net

Of course, a different number of words, or a different number of correct guesses can be used to get other times. If the tickler chooses the words randomly (or the ticklee guesses randomly), the most probable times using (w) words, and (n) total correct guesses are given by the equation:

Time (in minutes) = [((w)^(n))+1]

 --provided, of course, that n > 0.  Some examples are:

 Times in Minutes

 
For convenience, these results have been sorted by increasing time (and converted from minutes to hours when appropriate):
 

    
Since this is a probabilistic game, these times are only the most probable outcomes--other times are also possible. For example--although the odds make it very unlikely--the victim might never correctly guess the correct word, or always guess correctly.

These times also assume that the words are either selected and/or guessed randomly. The tickler can assure this by selecting them randomly. One way to do this is to write the words on pieces of paper, put them in a bowl, mix them up, draw a piece of paper from the bowl (without looking) and see what word it is (note: return the piece of paper to the bowl and remix them before drawing the next word).

Another way is to assign the words to numbers ranging from 1 to 6. Then put a die in a cup, shake the cup up, then look in to see what number/word is 'up'. For example, if you are using three words, you could choose to have: ("1" or "2" = word 1); ("3" or "4" = word 2); ("5" or "6" = word 3). In the case of 4 or 5 words, you could just shake again if the number on the die doesn't correspond to a word (i.e. a "5" or "6" in the case of 4 words, or a "6" in the case of 5 words).

Calvin
to_cal@mailexcite.com