5 ms·
20 questions game that works astonishingly well
- dc2k08 18y agoI 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.
- pavelludiq 18y agoFor me it guessed Hamlet, Bin Laden, Leonardo, Che Guevara and Woz, but couldn't think of Buddha.
- dc2k08 18y agowow@woz. for me it got: mother theresa, richard branson, bowie, tarantino but stumbled on dylan for tom waits. it will guess your cousin too.
- pavelludiq 18y agoIt guessed Randal Munroe! A warning to chronic procrastinators such as me, this is addictive!
- a-priori 18y agoBefore it started saying it's too busy, I stumped it twice: once with B'Elanna Torres and once with Kaylee (Firefly)
- patio11 18y agoI 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.
- ricree 18y agoNot 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.
- ramchip 18y ago4chan 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...
- paulgb 18y agoIf 4chan has had their way with it, I'm surprised it doesn't just answer "Rick Astley" to everything.
- psyklic 18y agoIt would be better if it didn't always respond "Too many users" -- AFTER having me fill out the "who i am" form.
- dc2k08 18y agoyeah 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.
- Tichy 18y agoUnusable for me because of the excessive amount of advertising on the site. Is it really that much better than 20q.net?
- dc2k08 18y agojust tried 20q.net and i can say it does make a lot better guesses and it is also not categorised.
- rms 18y agoThe 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_W0QQitemZ370113631968QQcmdZViewItem http://cgi.ebay.com/20-Q-Game-I-can-read-your-mind_W0QQitemZ...
- jerf 18y agoThis 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.)
- psyklic 18y agoI 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 http://www.20q.net always amazed me.
- vulpes 18y agoEntourage is underrepresented :)
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- ohxten 18y agoIt couldn't think of Ron Paul. Fail! ;)
- glenstein 18y agoI 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.
- jrmurad 18y agoAfter 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.
- axiom 18y agoI 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.
- earthboundkid 18y agoI beat it with Shankara, 8th c. Indian religious writer.
- whatusername 18y agoBeat 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)
- tdavis 18y agoIt didn't know who Dirk Pitt was. Universal litmus test for intelligence fails ;)
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- mynameishere 18y agoI fooled it with Hugo Simpson, then screwed it up when I clicked on some other Hugo during the "teach me" phase. Oh well.
- ksvs 18y agoDidn't seem that great. It didn't guess any of my choices (Bede, Vita Sackville-West, and Diocletian).
- jmtame 18y agoMy thought: aladin / The answer returned: harry potter
- tremendo 18y agoI 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.
- vlad 18y agoI tried searching for Paul Graham. I got Linus Torvalds, then Sergey Brin, then Drew Curtis, then Will Wright. Not bad company.
- globalrev 18y agoI beat it with The good in the good the bad and the ugly. He answered Leon. It is timing out all the time, unberable.
- sebg 18y agostumped it with tony the tiger. it guessed lassie.
- glenstein 18y agoI thought of Dagny Taggart, it guessed Howard Roark.
- CoreyN 18y agoI thought of John Galt and it guessed Howard Roark.
- dgordon 18y agoI used Jose Raul Capablanca, the third world chess champion. It wasn't even close.
- cool-RR 18y agoIt's very cool, but 20q (which is very similar) has been around for at least 5 years.