Twenty Questions

Artificial Intelligence guessing games! I heard about this program on the radio yesterday morning (93x Half-Assed Morning Show, of course); they didn't give the URL, but I found it myself. It's very simple. You think of something, and it will ask 20 questions to find out what it is. I was skeptical, even though they ran an example on the show, but now that I have used it myself I have to say that this thing is unbelievable.

I just can't stop playing with it. Things that the AI managed to guess by the twentieth question: skull, octopus, tattoo, ghost, cloud, beer, alpaca, unicorn(!), and bicycle (which it believes are not found in houses, but I disagree--there are three in mine). Actually, the interesting thing is that it gets this information from other people who play the game.

Obviously, this means that if you try to trick it by giving evasive answers, then you can, because it only knows as much as you tell it. Also, I tried some obscure things and noticed that someone had fed in a lot of wrong information about them, which ruins the game. More common items will be corrected quickly as users play with the program and tell it what they believe about them. I bet you will be amazed at what it can guess if you try to give it the most correct response.

Go ahead and try it out!