Ask HN: How does this online guessing site work?
http://en.akinator.com/
I'm quite amazed at how its able to guess even obscure people.
I'm quite amazed at how its able to guess even obscure people.
What's more interesting (to me) is why someone created this game. Maybe it's to sell ads, but that database has to be quite valuable as a corpus of information about relatively famous people... You could produce some fascinating network graphs from it.
Every answer narrows down the number of the persons. "Man or woman", for example, halfs the available search space. The subject being "French" makes it 100 times smaller (ignore all non-French entries in its database), etc.
Plus, depending of how the coded it, it can learn new people too (it asks you if it can't guess after enough tries). Most people (and it's used by 100s of thousands) ask for the same persons more or less (current stars, politicians, famous authors and painters, musicians, religious figures, comic heroes etc).
And what people consider "obscure" is not always really obscure either. E.g some might think that, say, Captain Beefheart is obscure. And compared to Justin Bieber he is. But he too is known by hundrends of thousands, so, he's not really difficult to find and store in a database of musicians.
I've had it stumble several times with more obscure people (e.g out of mainstream musicians), and in the end it gave up and asked me their names.
(Btw, the website also has a mobile app available, at least for iOS).
It would just have to crawl something like IMDB to get to know all Indian Actresses, their age, if they are still alive, their sex, etc. For more involved stuff, yes, it would need manual assistance to build a db.
But people also asking for the same actress will help it learn, if it doesn't know about her already. E.g at the point it gives up and ask you the name, you have already provided the system with 10-15 answers about the person.