The onscreen instructions tell you to type a “petition” in one field, and your question in the next. The petition is always a form of the phrase “Peter, please answer:” and the question can be anything.
It’s much more impressive to demonstrate this in person because to demonstrate it through a post I have to give away the trick in advance.
The trick is this: you start by typing in the answer in the “petition” field, to the question you intend to ask in the next field. No matter what you are typing, the screen display makes it appear you are typing the words “Peter, please answer:” in the petition field. You must put a period (.) before and after your answer, amd the last character in the petition field must be a colon :
Example: You want Peter to say that your friend has blue eyes.
In the petition field you type:
.blue. [After you put in your second period, which denotes the completion of your answer, you manually type in the completion of the peter “petition”. This is just fluff to make it appear to your friend that you’re typing in an actual plea for an answer.]
The screen displays this in the petition field:
Peter, [then whatever you type in as a cover plea. ](the display will print one letter of this peter phrase for each character you type for the answer). Type a COLON to end the field
You then type in the question:
What color are Bills eyes? [and hit enter]
I guess you shouldn’t let your unwitting friend ask a question for you to type because you might not know the answer.
YOU: Look at this website and see how it answers these personal questions!
THEM: That’s amazing! Ask it where Jimmy Hoffa is.
Actually, I just tried it, and if you don’t type in an answer before asking a question, it simply responds with some form of “I don’t know that one” or it ducks the question with a wisecrack response.
Well, it can all fall apart rather quickly. My friend said, “Let’s ask it your middle name – what is your middle name?” and I wouldn’t tell him. That kind of ended the charade right there.
But that’s a matter of presentation and developing a good patter.
Mrs. Flag was shocked that it would answer the questions. Then, she insisted on typing her own question. No response. She thought it was odd that it would answer all my questions but none of hers.
She doesn’t get it yet, but the best explanation she has come up with so far is that I typed in a bunch of info ahead of time.
Yeah, my students were all over that site about a month and a half ago.
We may do a programming exercise where we tease out the script, but I had to do a lot of find-and-replace with their obfuscated function and variable names.
I’m going to show this to my boss next week. After a couple of demo questions to set the stage, the 3rd question is going to have the answer, “Give Jim the rest of the week off for being so clever.”
