Friday, April 29, 2005

20 Questions

I came across this site that I find fairly interesting. If you click on the 'play 20q' link, (you don't need to give out any information about yourself, just click play), the computer starts to ask you questions about an object. I found that it guessed hamburger (it guessed cheeseburger, but close enough), duck-billed platypus, and motorcycle within the 20 questions.

Apparently the system learns from other users, so it is continually readjusting itself, and adding new objects. Isn't this kind of what we do when we learn? We observe the world, and give different objects different characteristics as we interact with them. We decide that a puppy is soft and warm, and a kick in the teeth is not. We classify this information and recall it when we need to.

Anyway...

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