[Sigia-l] 20questions--a little bit OT, but not entirely

Eric Scheid eric.scheid at ironclad.net.au
Sat Dec 11 21:43:59 EST 2004


On 12/12/04 1:23 PM, "Samantha Bailey" <a2slb at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> Sorry I wasn't clearer--what I saw as fascinating was the kinds of items
> that were appearing in the "other" and "unknown" category when I used the
> online version (whereas the items in the animal, vegetable and mineral
> categories were more predictable). I was thinking "trophy" and the app
> wasn't able to get it in 20 questions (although it did get it in 28
> questions)--in the grouping of items categorized with trophies, it included
> disco balls and that struck me as a very kind of "Women, Fire &  Dangerous
> Things" kind of classification. But it would appear that the categories they
> have developed are working pretty well, as the app is quite impressively at
> "guessing" the object. There are definitely core IA or at least
> classification issues at the heart of this--and the fact that it's a hot
> Christmas toy makes it a lot more exciting to me than, say, Tickle Me Elmo.

It's a riff on the old Animals game ... I remember laboriously typing in a
code listing into a Wang Personal Computer (with core memory!) back at the
dawn of the 1980's. Which just goes to show that this page on the IAwiki
isn't claiming any firsts: http://www.iawiki.net/TwentyQuestions

This particular riff has the old binary yes/no modelling replaced with a
fuzzier {Yes, No, Unknown, Irrelevant, Sometimes, Maybe, Probably, Doubtful,
Usually, Depends, Rarely, Partly}, which is then also statistically fuzzed
with answers from lots of other folks - the buzzword of today:
ethnoclassification ;-)

e.




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