how do apps like the original 20 questions game work?

Question

i downloaded an app that’s similar to the handheld 20 questions game i had as a kid.

i’m thinking of the most obscure characters and it still guesses it every time. someone please explain to me how this works

In: Technology

Answer 1

I actually learned this recently. The original 20Q device was actually built on an artificial neural network created and trained on a website that did the same thing the little electric game did. After training it with real people, using real rounds of questions it got really really good at figuring out what a person was thinking of. The network was trained in a way that didn’t rely on having everything programmed in. It actually learned to interpret how the user thought about questions. The more you used it, the better it got. It could even figure out what you might be thinking of based on more ‘folk taxonomy’ or how we as users might describe things, not just their standard or official clarification, i.e. tomatoes are technically fruit but it figured out most people would label them vegetables.

On a more speculative level I think the handheld game also had a neat advantage that helped it in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. The first is the massive library that it could store, without needing much more than general categories. An animal? Yes. That stops it from considering anything without the internal tag of ‘animal.’ The second is that it doesn’t need to ‘understand’ what it’s thinking about. It’s not working in the same direction as humans. We have to get an idea together, then determine questions that include or exclude it. But the computer simply has to take into account the number of possible answers it knows, and what questions best divides that group into efficient smaller parts. The third thing is something I specifically remember about the one I had growing up, but didn’t think about until much later. Mine, and I assume most of them, don’t have a yes or no as the first question. You could pan through animal, mineral, etc. Then you select one. So it gets a couple questions in.