

Ask HN: How does this online guessing site work? - thewarrior

http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.akinator.com&#x2F;<p>I&#x27;m quite amazed at how its able to guess even obscure people.
======
onion2k
It's just an expert system coupled to some sort of database (possibly
Wikipedia). Every time someone plays the game it records their answers. As
more and more people play it gets more and more data about each character, and
consequently more accurate. I imagine eventually it gives up and asks you who
you meant - and adds that character to the database. Given that I picked Brian
Cox and it said 7500 people had picked him before, it clearly has _a lot_ of
data to work with.

What's more interesting (to me) is _why_ someone created this game. Maybe it's
to sell ads, but that database has to be quite valuable as a corpus of
information about relatively famous people... You could produce some
fascinating network graphs from it.

------
coldtea
It's just a kind of "binary search" among different characteristics.

Every answer narrows down the number of the persons. "Man or woman", for
example, halfs the available search space. The subject being "French" makes it
100 times smaller (ignore all non-French entries in its database), etc.

Plus, depending of how the coded it, it can learn new people too (it asks you
if it can't guess after enough tries). Most people (and it's used by 100s of
thousands) ask for the same persons more or less (current stars, politicians,
famous authors and painters, musicians, religious figures, comic heroes etc).

And what people consider "obscure" is not always really obscure either. E.g
some might think that, say, Captain Beefheart is obscure. And compared to
Justin Bieber he is. But he too is known by hundrends of thousands, so, he's
not really difficult to find and store in a database of musicians.

I've had it stumble several times with more obscure people (e.g out of
mainstream musicians), and in the end it gave up and asked me their names.

(Btw, the website also has a mobile app available, at least for iOS).

~~~
thewarrior
But isnt the hard part building the database ? I'm from South India and it
knows about some small time south indian actresses. Either someone manually
put it all in or they have a very smart crawler.

~~~
lewispollard
I think it's part manual entry and part user generated content. If the site
fails to answer your question, you'll be prompted to type in who you thought
of, and it'll add them to its database. So it's quite likely someone already
thought of your small time actresses and added them in.

------
sharemywin
Probably based on something similar to 20q.net. Here's the patent application
[http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=...](http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=EP&NR=1710735&KC=&FT=E&locale=en_EP)

------
MattBearman
It didn't get Klayton of Celldweller, but it did guess (among others) Brett
from Blue Stahli, who is signed to Klayton's record label, so pretty close :)

------
yataa
Clickable: [http://en.akinator.com/](http://en.akinator.com/)

------
imdsm
It's actually just Jon Skeet.

