It got “your daughter” for me fairly easily (although it did feel the need to ask, towards the end “is your character connected with reggae music?”) but I stumped it on “great aunt”. It wanted to know “Does your character fight monsters”,“Does your character try to unravel a great conspiracy?” and “Is your character genetically modified?”
I’m impressed. I was able to stump it a couple of times though.
It got Romska Palo Ul Laputa (i.e. Colonel Muska) from Laputa: Castle in the Sky after two wrong guesses and ~42 questions.
I stumped it with Charles Wallace Murry from A Wrinkle in Time though he was in the data base.
I also stumped it with Dennis Gabor, the Nobel prize winning, Hungarian born, scientist/engineer that invented holography. He wasn’t in the data base.
I also stumped it with Forlong the Fat, the Lord of Lossarnach in the Lord of the Rings (wasn’t in the database). But, Maus Magill, it did guess I Radagast for this one…
“Does your character really exist?”
“Is your character a female?”
“Is she a teenager?”
“Does she have children?”
“Is she in the Bible?”
“Does she really exist?”
It got Seth MacFarlane on the first try, which amazed me because his identifiers are sorta vague. He’s a singer/actor/tv show writer/producer. I was answering “Yes partially” to every question, which I thought would confuse it.
It got Elizabeth I and Eli Roth in 15 questions. It got Homer Simpson fairly easily too. I stumped it on Ginger Rogers.
I was playing with it last night. For a while, every Canadian public figure I put into it was coming up “Pierre Elliot Trudeau”. That went for Trudeau, Wilfrid Laurier, and Jeanne Sauve. Then I tried Roberta Bondar, and it guessed Margaret Atwood. It got Garak from Deep Space Nine, though.
I tried Erik Prince, the CEO of Blackwater. The first guess was author Malcolm Gladwell. (second was David Patraeus.) This means that the Akinator is telling me Malcolm Gladwell has “probably, partially” killed people.
It found Pauline Hanson (racist Australian politician) after 40 questions. I was pretty impressed with that.
So, what’s the mechanism? Is it an evolving system, weeding out questions that don’t work? Or does it just utilise statistical analysis based on patterns of questions that get the correct answer. The randomness of the questions it asks makes me think it is (“Is your character a man?” then later “Is your character female?”; plus the questions re. my ex killing monsters after it had established a real person that I had slept with). Yet, the first 4 questions are fairly binary and useful, and are usually the same. Did those ones get to the top due to human intervention, or did they float to the top due to their former success?