4chan played with this a while ago, so you can find many manga/anime/game characters, including some really obscure ones (try it!). It has everybody from Tsukihime and Touhou...
I am amazed at the amount of data that had to be collected for this to correctly guess 5 for 5 of my characters. some of them were kind of obscure too. I wonder if they didn't crowd-source it some how.
edit: with the first incorrect guess of seven, i get it. they are crowd-sourcing the data every time it loses. brilliant.
A thought, can we use wikipedia info to boost up the accuracy of 20q? For that we can have a huge near accurate data at the beginning. Considering the paper on CIKM 2008 "Learning to Link with Wikipedia", I think that it is practical.
Beat it with Nynaeve al'Meara.
It guessed Rand al'Thor. (rather impressively. magic user, partial brother, fights with a sword)
.. and matrim cauthon (no magic, brothers/sisters, no sword, no beard)
these always impress me. (even if I do understand some of the math behind it)
The people from 20q.net manufactured a great physical device for playing the game. Sold for about $15 at Walmart, makes an exceptional gift for hard to shop for people. On eBay for $12 shipped... http://cgi.ebay.com/20-Q-Game-I-can-read-your-mind_W0QQitemZ...
I tried "Cory Booker," mayor of Newark (recently on The Colbert Report). It asked me the same questions several times but worded differently, and in the end it guessed Obama (though not surprising since Booker isn't as famous).
yeah it is annoying but once you have put in your stats, you can just keep pressing the start game button you get a spot within in a minute which admittedly is an aeon in net-time though.
Not only that. It was able to get the Black Hat guy from xkcd.
It also got Minsc (Baldur's Gate) and Conan the Barbarian. It took two tries to get Andrew Jackson (guessed George Washington the first time around), but got it after about 10 more questions.
I stumped it with Kaylee, too, and decided to add the question "Is your character an engineer?" Which it already had in the database. Then it asked me to evaluate the engineerness of 20 characters... and of the ones I recognized, most would be hard to differentiate from Kaylee by other questions.
That is pretty freaking slick, I've got to say. I don't even remember 20q.net having that.
I thought of Ron Paul, and I could tell by the questions that it already knew by the 5th or 6th question. It can guess Ron Paul. You answered a question incorrectly.
(Oh, and this is more parlor trick than clever programming. "Crowdsourcing" works with this parlor trick well.)