20 questions game that works astonishingly well | Hacker News Reader

20 questions game that works astonishingly well

en.akinator.com

25 pointsdc2k0837 comments

This is a standard machine learning homework assignment for decision trees. If you're interested in how these things work, that's where to look.

(Oh, and this is more parlor trick than clever programming. "Crowdsourcing" works with this parlor trick well.)

4chan played with this a while ago, so you can find many manga/anime/game characters, including some really obscure ones (try it!). It has everybody from Tsukihime and Touhou...

If 4chan has had their way with it, I'm surprised it doesn't just answer "Rick Astley" to everything.

I am amazed at the amount of data that had to be collected for this to correctly guess 5 for 5 of my characters. some of them were kind of obscure too. I wonder if they didn't crowd-source it some how.

edit: with the first incorrect guess of seven, i get it. they are crowd-sourcing the data every time it loses. brilliant.

A thought, can we use wikipedia info to boost up the accuracy of 20q? For that we can have a huge near accurate data at the beginning. Considering the paper on CIKM 2008 "Learning to Link with Wikipedia", I think that it is practical.

Or freebase.

I smugly thought to myself "there's no way it would be able to figure out Hercule Poirot, it's not even worth trying."

I'll be damned, it got it.

I beat it with Shankara, 8th c. Indian religious writer.

Beat it with Nynaeve al'Meara. It guessed Rand al'Thor. (rather impressively. magic user, partial brother, fights with a sword) .. and matrim cauthon (no magic, brothers/sisters, no sword, no beard)

these always impress me. (even if I do understand some of the math behind it)

Unusable for me because of the excessive amount of advertising on the site. Is it really that much better than 20q.net?

just tried 20q.net and i can say it does make a lot better guesses and it is also not categorised.

The people from 20q.net manufactured a great physical device for playing the game. Sold for about $15 at Walmart, makes an exceptional gift for hard to shop for people. On eBay for $12 shipped... http://cgi.ebay.com/20-Q-Game-I-can-read-your-mind_W0QQitemZ...

I fooled it with Hugo Simpson, then screwed it up when I clicked on some other Hugo during the "teach me" phase. Oh well.

I tried "Cory Booker," mayor of Newark (recently on The Colbert Report). It asked me the same questions several times but worded differently, and in the end it guessed Obama (though not surprising since Booker isn't as famous).

http://www.20q.net always amazed me.

After the 20th question, it guessed Bertrand Russel when I was thinking of Thomas Paine who was in the list after I told it the guess was incorrect.

I thought of Dagny Taggart, it guessed Howard Roark.

I thought of John Galt and it guessed Howard Roark.

I am stunned. The questions were mostly way off and got only marginally closer in the last 4-5, then came the correct answer: Pancho Villa.

I tried searching for Paul Graham. I got Linus Torvalds, then Sergey Brin, then Drew Curtis, then Will Wright. Not bad company.

It would be better if it didn't always respond "Too many users" -- AFTER having me fill out the "who i am" form.

yeah it is annoying but once you have put in your stats, you can just keep pressing the start game button you get a spot within in a minute which admittedly is an aeon in net-time though.

Didn't seem that great. It didn't guess any of my choices (Bede, Vita Sackville-West, and Diocletian).

I beat it with The good in the good the bad and the ugly. He answered Leon.

It is timing out all the time, unberable.

For me it guessed Hamlet, Bin Laden, Leonardo, Che Guevara and Woz, but couldn't think of Buddha.

wow@woz. for me it got: mother theresa, richard branson, bowie, tarantino but stumbled on dylan for tom waits. it will guess your cousin too.

It guessed Randal Munroe! A warning to chronic procrastinators such as me, this is addictive!

Before it started saying it's too busy, I stumped it twice: once with B'Elanna Torres and once with Kaylee (Firefly)

I stumped it with Kaylee, too, and decided to add the question "Is your character an engineer?" Which it already had in the database. Then it asked me to evaluate the engineerness of 20 characters... and of the ones I recognized, most would be hard to differentiate from Kaylee by other questions.

That is pretty freaking slick, I've got to say. I don't even remember 20q.net having that.

Not only that. It was able to get the Black Hat guy from xkcd.

It also got Minsc (Baldur's Gate) and Conan the Barbarian. It took two tries to get Andrew Jackson (guessed George Washington the first time around), but got it after about 10 more questions.

It's very cool, but 20q (which is very similar) has been around for at least 5 years.

I used Jose Raul Capablanca, the third world chess champion. It wasn't even close.

It didn't know who Dirk Pitt was. Universal litmus test for intelligence fails ;)

My thought: aladin / The answer returned: harry potter

Entourage is underrepresented :)

It couldn't think of Ron Paul.

Fail! ;)

I thought of Ron Paul, and I could tell by the questions that it already knew by the 5th or 6th question. It can guess Ron Paul. You answered a question incorrectly.

stumped it with tony the tiger. it guessed lassie.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com