20 Q

Did you ever wonder how the computer game 20 questions works?

              In 1988 Robin Burgner, a computer programmer, started developing a game based on artificial intelligence. In 1994, he put it on the internet and people he never knew were playing it. Over time, it started to become more successful. Then in 1998 Yahoo chose it as their website of the week. In that week alone, people played 10,000 games, doubling its number of players from before. People began to become addicted to playing 20Q.  Four years later, Burgner was laid off from a software company and decided he didn't want to go back to working as a software programmer since he had been laid off 3 times in the past 4 years. As a result, he expanded upon his 20Q idea and later, a toy company in Dallas called Radica wanted to make 20Q into a hand held game. It was a huge success and won the 2006 Toy Industry Association Electronic Entertainment Toy of the Year.

The 20Q toy gathers information from what people think rather than what experts know. It draws conclusions and interprets this knowledge by utilizing artificial intelligence.  The more the game is played, the quicker the computer can guess the object. It will start to figure out if someone is purposely misleading the program and can determine the correct answer even when given the wrong information. For example, if I was thinking of an animal, but said it was a vegetable, it doesn't come from the ground isn't sweet, is healthy, and not smaller than golf ball, the game would catch on that I'm not thinking of a vegetable. Then, it would ask me questions like is it warm-blooded, white, and is it used for transportation? If I answer these correctly, the game would determine that my animal is a horse. This amazing toy also generates two thirds of its own knowledge by itself and is as intelligent as an insect.

I picked to do my project on this topic because I was always so amazed by how this game works and I want to figure out how it knows what I am thinking.  I first developed an interest for this game when I gave 20Q out for a goody-bag in 4th grade. Now I play it whenever I can't go to sleep and I never stopped wondering how it works.

By,
CK
 http://www.sittingo.com/talk/713 K

Twenty questions

When I was doing my research I found a couple paragraphs written by the wife of the inventor of the game 20 question. These couple paragraghs that she wrote really summed everything up and got me started on my research, so here they are:
Mr. Burgener, based in Ottawa, Canada, first developed the software in 1988, to satisfy his own curiosity about learning systems. "The programmatic solution seems fairly simple," he starts out to say. "Build a tree. If the program fails, ask for a question to differentiate the last object from the new object. But, if one player answers a question from a different perspective, the game will fail; player input is subject to human nature and cannot be 100 per cent correct every time."
"The solution I have used," he said, "relies on a matrix of every object by every question; each element in the matrix indicates an answer for one object and one question." In very simple terms, the program determines the most probable objects and then looks at the questions to find the question that could eliminate the most objects. "But then it gets fuzzy," says Mr. Burgener. "The answers in the knowledgebase are weighted by certainty, and are, more often than not, unknown rather than known."
"a failure for the game is not really a failure, because the program learns from every game that is played."
Sourcehttp://www.mikiko.net/library/weekly/1998articles/aa090698.htm
I picked to do my project on this topic because I was always so amazed on how this game works and I had a craving to answer my question. How does a battery powered, $20 toy have the mind of a computer? And that is exactly what I'm going to figure out. I first developed a love for this game when I gave 20 questions out for a goody-bag in 4^th grade. Now I play it whenever I can't go to sleep and I never stopped wondering how it works.
Here is a video link that explains how it works in detail. This will be my main source. Please watch it you will be amazed and it is funny ! J

http://www.sittingo.com/talk/713
By,
CK