Links & Websites: June 2005 Archives
Fun stuff to do when you're feeling smarter than a computer, and need to correct that stance: 20Q.net is a simple game that will "guess" you right most of the time. Try it.
Kevin Kelly -- Cool Tools: Play 20Q: Ten-dollar AI. Burned into its 8-bit chip is a neural net that has been learning for 17 years. Inventor Robin Burgener programmed a simple neural net on a DOS machine 1988. He taught it 20 questions about a cat. He than passed the program around to friends on a floppy and had them challenge the neural net with their yes/no answers to the object they had in mind. The neural net learns only when it plays a game; no data is added except for the yes/no answers of visitors. So the more people who test it, the more they teach it. In 1995 Burgener put the now robust neural net onto the new web where anyone could play it (that is, train it) 24 hours a day. And they did. Burgener's genius was to turn the hard tedious work of training a neural net into a fun game for humans.
20Q.net: Twenty Questions - The neural-net on the Internet. 20Q.net is an experiment in artificial intelligence. The program is very simple but its behavior is complex. Everything that it knows and all questions that it asks were entered by people playing this game. 20Q.net is a learning system; the more it is played, the smarter it gets.
Sadly, it doesn't know much about backyard swimming pools as it doesn't know about swim-rings or life preservers. But it will tell "you" where you went wrong in telling it about what you were thinking. For example: Rubber Ducks are NOT round; and are (apparently) NOT used at night. But it gets things like "Ex-wives are un-pleasurable" just fine. I guess it comes down to "garbage in, garbage out." Either way, its fun; and if it has what you're thinking about in its database (and you answer accurately) it'll guess it soon enough to make you want to try again.
