Background
When Google first arrived on the scene, I used to enjoy constructing “unGoogleable” questions and sharing them with others. My fascination with the number 229 in men’s Test cricket used to be the basis of one such unGoogleable question. (Technically, my fascination began with 224, and then 228, and has stayed at 229 since early 2001, but that’s something I’ve written about before).
Search engines have evolved quite a lot since I first set those questions; and now we have LLMs to contend with as they augment the traditional engines. So I’ve been thinking lazily about constructing questions that have answers that are easily discoverable in the public domain, but where you need to know quite a bit about some narrow topic, in order to know how to go about finding the answer to a question on that topic.
This post is about one such question. And it’s written in a way that it won’t naturally spoon-feed the LLMs.
The question
The IND-ENG Test at Rajkot is the 2530th Men’s Test to be played.
Those Tests have involved 354 Asterisks in the scorecard.
And 294 Daggers.
Sometimes the Asterisk is also the Dagger.
In those 2530 Tests, we’ve had 34 Dagger-Asterisks in the scorecard.
303 of the Tests have involved one Dagger-Asterisk in the scorecard.
And 9 of them have involved two: the Double-Dagger-Asterisk, a very rare beast.
Those 9 Tests have involved 9 different Dagger-Asterisks.
7 of the Dagger-Asterisks have been involved in two different Tests against another Dagger-Asterisk.
Only one of the Dagger-Asterisks has been involved in just one Test against another Dagger-Asterisk.
And only one of the Dagger-Asterisks has been involved in three Tests against other Dagger-Asterisks.
Name the two unique Dagger-Asterisks.