Mind = Blown

[Angrboda]

I'm not sure if it is worth creating an entire thread over this, but I just had to show you guys: http://en.akinator.com/

Think of anyone, anyone, from Richard Dawkins to Barack Obama to Walter White (from Breaking Bad) to Tellah (from FFIV) to Cresselia (the Pokemon), to yourself, and this site will guess it! This almost makes me believe in psychic powers...

I got tired after too many questions, particularly after agreeing that my character had been dead over 100 years, then having it ask me if my character participated in WWII. I suspect that, after a long round of questions, if it doesn't succeed in identifying your particular character, it will ask you to submit a question relevant to your character, the name of the character, and what the correct answer is. I suspect this is a variant of what is known in programming as the animal game. Basically how it works is that every time it can't guess the character (or animal), it asks for a question to be used to identify the character (or animal), with a yes or no answer corresponding. This builds a database of questions whose answers form a tree structure, as at every node, there is either another question in one direction, or an answer in the form of the character (or animal). The program simply follows this decision tree until it either arrives at the right answer, or runs out of nodes and must ask for the question / answer / character triad, which it adds to its current decision tree. With enough rounds of this, and a sufficiently large decision tree, I imagine it can seem uncanny. But note, all the intelligence is supplied by the people furnishing the questions.

On a personal note, my first non-trivial program in COBOL was a version of the animal game which I wrote in high school.