Monday, April 23, 2007

20 questions

My mother now has two of those 20 questions electronic doovies. We took one each and used the same item (teapot) to see if they would behave the same....not. While they both got the answer right, the questions they asked were somewhat different and in a different order. Do these things have limited free will? We also did a run with the item "Virus" only my mother answered the questions truthfully, while I tried to get the answers as wrong as possible. Mum's machine got the answer "virus" while I got "lynx". There you go, the opposite of a virus is a lynx. Also, from a previous test, another word for "world peace" is apparently "Fart". At least it is according to a 20 question device.

3 comments:

Chris Fellows said...

I was floored by one of these programs a few months ago. It went through about a dozen questions of the 'Is it green?', 'Is it alive?' 'Does it have four legs?' sort, each of which I carefully answered in as pedantic a way as possible. Then it made one guesss as to what it was: 'Is it a pterodactyl?'

And it was...

BTW, I very much like your algorithm for determining what the opposite of things is. Will have to explore it!

Jenny said...

I'm going to try it some more. The only thing that annoys me is the length of pause before you see the next question. I'm a busy girl

Jenny said...

on other news...the sending me an email if I get a comment doesn't work. in spite of being set up to. I have to check my blog to see comments. Maybe my email system is blocking emails from google sites