It got David Murphy (second string) for the Texas Rangers! I’m impressed.
But do you think it uses our information from the beginning to help it guess
Stumped on David Hodo (Construction worker of the Village People)
Some day I’ll be able to pick a character it actually can guess. (Misery from Cave Story, Merlin Mann, and Christa B. Allen all stumped it).
It’s clearly not a straight binary tree, as evidenced by questions using “he” after deciding gender as female, repeated questions, and other weirdness like (“Does the character have a son?” after asking “Is the character under the age of 15?”). Must be probability based in some way.
Due to the recent AVENGERS thread bad-mouthing the Swordsman, I figured – and correctly! – that he’d stump Akinator.
I don’t know what a binary tree is but it doesn’t appear to understand much if any relationship between the questions. Probably because users appear to be able to add questions. It very often does things like:
“Is the character a red-head?” yes
“is the character a brunette?” no
“does the character have red hair?” Duh
or “Does the character die a tragic death?” yes
“Is the character dead?”… I don’t know how to answer that.
Especially if it goes over 20 questions it seems to start asking the same question in different wording a lot. I had one where it asked me if the character was American 5 times with different wordings.
Of course, some of the questions, it has to ask to learn more about the character. The only way it can know that “Is the character under the age of 15?” “No” will usually lead to “Does the character have a son?” “No” is by asking that pair of questions many times. It doesn’t actually understand any of the questions it asks.
There’s a difference, of course, between ‘Is the character American?’ ‘Is the character from America?’ ‘Does the character live in America?’ and ‘Is the character a citizen of the United States?’
I did a bunch of MLP characters…it got Pinkie Pie and Spike in 20 questions, and Scootaloo in 30.
It got Rarity in 15.
It got Rarity’s cat in 17. Opal’s shown up in 3 episodes (Suited For Success, The Stare Master and Owl’s Well That Ends Well), and only had more than a minute or two on screen in Suited For Success…
Wow, the question line leading to Haifa Wehbe was pretty rude. (“Is this character known for her breasts?”)
Name one female character who’s not known for her breasts. One way or the other. 
I didn’t see that users could add questions. (It appears that option shows up only when you lose, which seems to be a rather odd way of doing things). That does make more sense as to how it fails.
Amazingly did not get Nuggets head coach George Karl in 20 guesses. Got it after about 25.
Quoth Tengu:
True, but there’s enough correlation between those that an ideal algorithm would probably never ask more than one of them.
It correctly guessed John Smoltz for me (in 20) even though I gave three answers which were not what it would have expected for Smoltz (though my answers were definitely correct).
Not necessarily.
I got both ‘Does the character live in America?’ and ‘Is the character a citizen of the US?’ in one. The answers were, respectively, yes, and no. Because I was doing Raj Koothrepalli (lives in Sacramento, is still an Indian citizen). Not getting both of those points covered wouldn’t be insurmountable for guessing him, but it would sure make the confidence lower.
The system seems to start breaking when you get too deep in–when user-entered questions come into play, perhaps? I was asked, for example, if my character had children, several questions after I’d answered that yes, he did have grandchildren.
I defeated it with P.G.T. Beauregard, which was strange because it seemed to home in fairly quickly on the idea of a Confederate general, but then guessed Lee, Longstreet and Jackson rather randomly amidst a bunch of irrelevant-seeming questions. And again, questions whose answers should have been understood to be contained within previous answers–“has he been dead more than 20 years” after an affirmative answer that he had participated in the American Civil War.
I beat it with the Archimage Binah from Black Trillium. (by Andre Norton, Julian May and Marion Zimmer-Bradley)
It asked me that when I was thinking of Power Girl
29 questions to correctly name Isaac Asimov.
I completely stumped it with Maura from the Diesel Sweeties webcomic. It’s first guess was Sasha Grey, probably because it asked the questions “Is your character a porn star?” and “Is your character associated with the color gray?” (I answered yes to the second question because Maura was dating Clango, the robot. But maybe he’s actually silver.)
More Discworld: 16 questions to get Sam Vimes, but 30 to get Carrot.
It got Sonic the Hedgehog and Lee Kuan Yew.
Bastard had PICTURES. Dammit.
I defeated him with Dashiell Hammett. I was surprised how easily he got Maude Lebowski though.