20Q

Photo taken from www.paramountzone.com

I came across this A.I. game that's called '20Q', short for '20 Questions'. It's the name of the game, as well as the name of the object/application that's doing the guessing.

The game works as such:

You, the player, will think of an item, and 20Q will read your mind. If 20Q manages to guess it right within 20 Yes or No (and sometimes 'Unknown') questions, 20Q wins.

It will continue asking until it has asked 30 questions (which include their guesses), and if it can't guess your item right even then, you win hands down. =)

I was extremely skeptical about it, but thought it'd be interesting, so I went to find an online version of the game after I saw the toy sold on ThinkGeek, and tried it out.

My Experience
My first item I had in my mind was 'MP3 player'. Even after answering 10+ questions, I didn't think that it'd get it right. My head was constantly wondering if it even knew what an mp3 player was.

Thus came the shock when it made its first guess at question 18.

It actually guessed right.

My surprise got me playing the game a total of 5 times. Out of the 5 times, it won twice. Once, it only answered right at question 22. Twice I won. The funny thing was out of that two times, I thought of a 'cap'. At the end of the game, I could not find 'cap' in their list of items -_-" They had , however, a 'baseball cap' listed. Odd.

You can give it a try for fun, or if you have nothing better to do ;) It may amuse your kids for hours as well ^^


Signing off... ...