FIRST! There, now nobody else can have it. On to more important things, like this week's Link Dump Friday! While searching through the internet (which requires safety gear like Ed Harris' diving set-up in The Abyss) I came across some pixels, a magical fly, a know-it-all-genie, some robots, and then I crammed in some fine art on top of it because I thought your horizons could do with some broadening. Enjoy!
Akinator - I'm thinking of a super villain between one and a billion! Who is it? Well, if you were Akinator, the Web Genius, you'd just have to ask me a few questions and you'd figure it out. This simple little webtoy has you think of any person, living, dead, or fictional, and if you're honest in your responses to his yes/no/maybe/partially/dunno questions, there's a good chance he'll know who you're thinking about. (Though not always.) What's most impressive is that there are times when Akinator appears to guess your person based on a relatively benign set of questions. (Akinator somehow arrived correctly at Donna Noble by asking if she'd been to space, then if she was a gangster rapper. I wish!) Is he looking into your mind? Probably not. (Too dark in there to see much anyway.) But it's still a lot of fun.
Wolfenstein 1D - Quiet possibly the demake-est of the demakes, this one-pixel line "recreation" of classic Wolfenstein is a clever experiment that's more than a little hard on the old ocular orbs. I, uh. Never played Wolfenstein, so I don't really have much to say about this one, other than "PYEW PYEW ARGH", which is a fairly accurate representation of the gameplay. I was going to ponder how much further you can actually demake something until I realised that by not creating a demake of, say, Earthbound, I have actually created the greatest demake of all time. Or would I have ro make it... then un-make it? Hmmm. That makes sense. Trust me.
Robot Clashes - Robots, robots, everywhere, and not a drop to drink! That... is how that goes, right? Hmmm. Better check in with fellow word aficionado AdamC; "Robot Clashes is a stylish real time strategy game that pits your robot army against waves of enemy robots. Use the [mouse] to navigate the battle screen, where robot after robot is spawned from your base every seven seconds or so, and lead your robots into almost certain death on the right side of the screen. The game tasks you with upgrading your robots via crates that can be spawned after a given amount of time."... well, that's almost what I said.
Microcosmic Shooter - Part shooter, part point-and-click adventure, this queer little hybrid tells the story of a boy who goes through something we've all had happen to us from time to time... namely, he gets shrunk by a magical mosquito fly thing in his bathroom and must battle and puzzle his way to safety using his wits and perfume. It's definitely unique, though hampered by the lack of checkpoints or a save function and some fairly liberal attention being drawn to hotspots. Still, ridiculously cute, and fair warning for you the next time you find yourself shrunk by an insect. It's bound to happen sooner or later. Don't be ashamed; everyone goes through it.
Riddles of Renaissance - [Note: Contains some nudity and depictions of violence.] Ah, the Renaissance! A time when supple hips and the knowledge of how to braise an entire pig were all you needed to be immortalised in some really classy fine art, as long as you had your own flowy robes to drape yourself in. This puzzle game shows you pictures of classic artwork and asks you to find and click on the portion of the image that corresponds to the riddle you're given. Fairly simple, if occasionally a little perplexing. I miss the Renaissance. Back then, art was just beautiful. These days, you can't even argue on someone putting a used Egg McMuffin wrapper under a spotlight and calling it art because someone is going to be moved to tears by the symbolism or whatever. Kids today.
If only Wolfenstein 1D had a thicker line to look at, I could have done much better. Curse my screen resolution!
The djinn got Andrew Wiggin after like 10 questions.
Akinator is spooky. I gave him Gandalf, Eleanor Roosevelt, Joe Strummer and Captain Beefheart and he nailed them all. HOW DOES HE DO THAT?
Hah! Finally stumped him with A.S. Byatt.
Akinator scares me.
It's gotten all 10 of my people.
Played Akinator a few times and stumped him half the time (though I never went past his first guess). Sometimes, his questions are really bewildering. For Sojourner Truth, I said real, female, American, black... a few questions later, he asks "Has your character been pope"! No... I don't think there has ever been a female or American or black Pope... (He eventually guessed Rosa Parks; Sojourner Truth was second on the list.)
Then, he guessed Wendy when I was thinking Susan Pevensie. This one, his last question was "Is your character the youngest in his band or group?", which should be No for both of them, but his expected answer was yes!
Ah yes the Akinator. Good times indeed. I remember I was first few people to get Baby Luigi to work properly. I taught that genie good.
Akinator scares me. He figured out Megatron from G1 Transforemrs; Gerrard Capashen and Karn from Magic: the Gathering, and Waspinator, from Beast Wars. I didn't expect either of the last two to show up.
Dora, if you've never played Wolfenstein3D, you should. It's like an old-school Doom. ... really old-school Quake? ... ancient Half-Life? ... prehistoric Halo? ... It's fun, let's put it like that.
--
Regarding Akinator, after stumping it twice, once with a fictional character (B.S. Johnson from Terry Pratchett's Diskworld) and once with a real person (Nobel Prize-winning chemist Gerty Cori) I would wager that it's an above-average version of your standard learning 20 questions game. That is, it has a list of all the people, and it ranks them by how frequently people answered yes/no. You said the person was European? 90% of people who had Sigmund Freud said yes to that question, but 0% of people who had John Wayne. Move Freud toward the top, and Wayne toward the bottom.
If you stump it, you can add the person, and at the end there's an "Add question" feature, which, if your question already exists, you can supply answers for some of the top characters on the list.
That said, the cohesiveness of the questions leaves a lot to be desired. It asked me three times if Cori was a female, and twice if she was a real person. And even after I told it she was real, it wanted to know if she was a Halo character. (Also, it kept using "he/him/his", even after I said she was female - slightly offensive.) It then thrashed around Europe a lot trying to place her, although I did appreciate the distinction between "is she German" [No] and "does she speak German" [I don't know]).
It was worth it for the time Akinator suggested Godot (from Waiting for Godot) - "No picture available. Please help us find one." (The whole point of Waiting For Godot is that Godot never appears.)
I was wondering if Akinator was ever gonna show up here on JiG.
...In hindsight I suppose I could've used the "submit game" function, huh?
OH! By the bye, something amusing for Akinator:
Watch what happens if you just give him the same answer for every question or keep alternating between "Yes" and "No". Or, for that matter...
choose yourself or a family member as your character!
Wow, Akinator got Ashton Kutcher... and then guessed Mad Hatter, then Kronk, then the Carpenter from Alice, for the King of Hearts (which is not in the database, but most of the guesses were still really close, though!) Amazing...
He guessed
Spiderman, Iron Man, Nightcrawler and Deadpool
I'm scared. omo
Akinator didn't work well for me. But then again, who is John Galt? The Akinator doesn't know.
You owe it to yourself to play the original wolfenstein. It is cheap on steam. Go for it!
The Akinator is surprisingly addictive.
In my quest to stump him, one of his guesses was The Akinator's Brother!
People I thought would stump him for sure:
--DC's Captain Marvel
--Beat from The World Ends with You
--Unknown-person's Climber
...he got those in 20 or less.
And yet I threw him off with Jack and Sinclair (Bioshock and Bioshock 2, respectively).
Also, when I was thinking of my roommate, he firsts asks, "Does this character live with you?", then, "Has this character served in the Civil War?" Huh?
Microcosmic shooter -- fun little diversion.
Riddles of Renaissance - excellent quiz about some great art -- some lesser-known works, too. Only minor argument is that some of the graphics are a little too small/low res to see, so opening the Wiki file for the works, then zooming, makes life a little easier. Such a sad statement that there has to be a nudity/violence warning about masterpieces that have been around for hundreds of years.
BAHAHAHAHA!
I was thinking of Bill Kaulitz from Tokio Hotel whilst playing Akinator. It asked 'Do they were freaky clothes?' I answered yes. Akinator got it.
XD
Time to see if it knows who Andy Six is...
Wow..
Coraline
Don Quixote
Raskolnikov
Joseph K.
Lyra Belacqua
Simone de Beauvoir
Henrik Ibsen
Haruki Murkami
Akinators lamp
Scary Akinator guessed them all!
Hah!
Mr. Akinator couldn't guess J. M. Coetzee.
And he didn't get Cruella de Vil either, but I suspect that's because I couldn't answer any questions about her.
Addicted, me?
Marcus Welby, MD left Akinator completely stumped.
(WHAT possessed me to think of that is beyond me.)
The Akinator was able to guess my favorite author and my favorite songwriter, but not my favorite fashion designer. I thought for sure he would be able to guess Vivienne Westwood. Maybe he is not into fashion. Off to try Elsa Schiaparelli.
Theodore Roosevelt stumped Akinator, and I took that one far enough that it quit on me. Took it two tries to guess Magneto, as well. It can sleuth out Homestuck characters pretty fast, though.
Is it just me or does the "more games" button at Akinator doesn't work?
HAHA. Akinator got "Undercover Brother." but missed Marty McFly?? Cool program
I#m not a FPS fan, but Wolfstein 3D made a fluid, high frames per second 3D-engine on a 4MHZ 80386 CPU. Compare that to todays clicky-blinky-flash-drag-drop coding techniques where some 2D engines brings down a 2000MHZ CPU easily into its knees.
Robot Clashes - I can't seem to upgrade. being letting it play in the background for nearly 30 minutes. Resouces I have 3500+ 1000+.
What to do I need to click I've tried everything I can think of. I'm playing on Mac using safari but also tried firefox.
Akinator is really quite spooky. It made a couple of wrong guesses but after more questions, about 30 or so, it guessed that I was thinking of Black Hat Guy from XKCD. o_O
I remember first seeing a link to Akinator and being quite wowed by it. But that was mostly because it was stuffed to the brim with characters from the site it was linked on.
Now that I revisit it and gave it 3 not-too-obvious characters from completely different genres and it completely 100% failed on all 3... I'm not wowed anymore.
Id didn't even guess Asok. That's as popular-yet-not-obvious as it gets.
Took only two attempts to beat the akinator - (didn't know the queen of the night from magic flute. So getting a classic education was good for something... ;))
A certain games reviewer just got added to Akinator. :D
Haha, Akinator guessed the Heavy Weapons Guy on the first try. I knew he had me when he asked "Is your person from a Valve game?"
Although it's great to see a game about paintings, the execution of Riddles of Renessaince is horrible IMHO... I never found where and how to turn on the music, for a start. Then the paintings are low res - even with the quality set to high - and s sometimes it's pure pixel hunting for those who don't know these paintings very well. The "Riddles" aren't always real riddles, some of them are almost insultingly easy. When the paintings take up all the space available, the game asks you to hold the A key to read the riddle - well, if you switch to anpther scree and come back, pressing the A key has no effect - you have to click on the painting first - but it's taken as a guess then...
The English sounds queer sometimes - though never too much.
So, the idea is good, but it should have been polished much, much more I think...
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Oh man... I gave up at Riddle #30. Anyone who can stand the music longer is my guest for a beer :)
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OK, so get this: I'm seeing if he'll guess Blaziken (he certainly will, since he's already guessed ononokusu, flygon, dunsparce, zuruggu, etc.), and he asks "Did your character appear in Playboy?" I think once he's already sure who it is, he just asks random questions til the end to learn more about that character.
I remember playing Akinator some time back and there was a long discussion on that forum about what algorythms it may use when guessing - the thing is that it rarely if ever guesses wrong, although we had quite some cases where the questions it asked didn't narrow down the possible solutions to one person - in these cases it really loked like it was reading minds :)
We guessed it does a google search by the data it pobtains from the answers and guesses when there's an overwhelming "favourite" in the results...
But sure it's a fun game.
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37th!
Anyway, Akinator almost made me spit out my tea with laughing! It wasn't so much that it guessed "My Husband" correctly, as that great picture that came up with it! I mean, it almost looks just like him... though he's generally not holding a football like that...
Akinator guessed weegee (not luigi, Weegee, as in the mario is missing meme, the ytp meme), and that blew my mind. He also guessed kevin flynn from Tron, and Ciel Phantomhive from Kuroshitsuji.
The funniest part is it actually took him two guesses to get Luigi. But only one for Weegee. Hrmmm.
In the game description for Riddles, "note" translates to "why people play this game"
Akinator is a fun little toy. Took forever to guess Andrew Lee Potts though...
Riddles of Renaissance is nearly impossible on a large monitor running a large screen size (mine is set to 1600X1200) And yeah, pretty much reduces it to a lot of pixel hunting as you can't really make out details very well.
Akinator guessed Starscream correctly! (wrong series, though)
Freaky....
0.0
And then it thought Jack Sparrow appeared in Playboy....despite the fact that I said he was not real....
Got it right though.
I need to be more obscure....
Ender's Game? Whoah...
The chestburster/facesucker from Alien? o.0 How is it DOING this!?
-.- I shall try the book I am now reading. The Acorna series by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball.
Took forever...and guessed Neytiri from Avatar.
Then Becky the Hedgehog.
Then Zoe from Sesame Street...despite NEVER going into space (or did she?)
I beat him!
Microcosmic Shooter is an awesome game - with one bug: if you are killed, the game starts over - but an "invisible" fly seems to keep attacking you from nowhere and kills you again and again, until you reload the page...
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SkylerF,
"And then it thought Jack Sparrow appeared in Playboy....despite the fact that I said he was not real...."
Why, Marge Simpson appeared in Playboy too, didn't she? :D :D :D
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The Microcosmic shooter was...interesting...
But Riddles of Renaissance had that stupid "Connecting to Newsgrounds gateway" on it while I played. Eventually it covered a hint completely and I had to reload the game. Then it was gone.
Marge Simpson was in Playboy?
See, I have never read it.
And in the Microcosmic Shooter, you are able to die? Was there some sort of meter? Or did I just get lucky and the fly was able to hit me 20+ times....?
Even though I think the game is neat, I was disappointed to see that Akinator couldn't guess Eugene Delacroix on my first play, and he wasn't listed in the suggestions afterwards either.
Akinator, I only stumped it with Robin Hood. It got Professor Utonium, Richard the Lionheart, Howlin' Pelle Almqvist (Lead singer of my favorite band) and a bunch of others. This is amazing. Also stumped it with Ole Kirk Christiansen, the inventor of LEGO.
Andrew Wiggin is programmed as an option? Didn't expect Ender on there…
Akinator got Prince Vultan from Flash Gordon. Gordon's Alive?!!
It got Petra Arkanian on one guess. That thing is amazing.
Took Akinator a while to get Van from Zoids.
For Golgo 13, I said no to "is he a thief" and he guessed
Lupin III!
But, he did get Pegasus Seiya in 20 questions. So, his batting average is all over the place.
SkylerF,
"Marge Simpson was in Playboy? See, I have never read it."
http://stepintomyshoes.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/marge-simpson-playboy-cover-2.jpg?w=450&h=553
:)
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Firstly, I love you for providing Donna Noble as an example. Spread the love, man!
I tried singer Mary Black, Thursday Next, Aslan, King John and Spongebob Squarepants, and Akinator got all of them. However, he was stumped on Charley Pollard. (Thought she was Donna Noble!)
I shall take a hint from SkylerF and go to the library next.
SkylerF
"And in the Microcosmic Shooter, you are able to die? Was there some sort of meter? Or did I just get lucky and the fly was able to hit me 20+ times....?"
I managed to die, a couple of times, actually. Reason: wrong choice of weapon and tacticsat the boss scene.
First, I found the cannon or what - the last weapon you can assemble - too slow so I opted for the spray to get rid of the pairs of flies the Big Boss's kept sending. I figured gthere would be a certain number of them to beat and then the Big Boss - WRONG! Had to realize the guy probably keeps sending those pairs of flies until he's alive and that I should shoot him in between the pairs' attacks... If you don't do that fast enough and let those guys have you too many times, you're pretty much dead - and have to start from the home base again... Not a real shock, since knowing what to do it takes about 5 minutes to get to the Big Boss again - I just know, I had to do it like 4 times :D :D
I'd say get rid of that irritating sound of the rubber band being stretched, include a save feature - at least for certain progress points - like having a weapon assembled or certain flies killed, and include new levels or a longer gameplay and it's an easy 5-star rating game IMHO :D I thoroughly enjoyed shooting those bastards with the hairclip-rubber band-toothpick bow :D :D :D
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It also got the monkey holding cards in the banner ad and the girl in the banner ad.
Yes, Akinator! I discovered that a while back. I've played with that thing a lot and only stumped it a few times.
It really impressed me when it got Prince Alexander from King's Quest VI.
Hmmm.. this one's really weird... Decided to take a chance on Akinator again, this time with a sportsman who is famous in a lesser-known area of sport: ski jumping. The game knew he's Norwegian, guessed a Norwegian skier (not a ski jumper though), incoirrect guess, let it go on. The next question: "Is your character Brazilian?"
Now, if it already knows he's Norwegian... I just don't seem to see tha reason beuhind that question... - other than a bug, of course - or ta far-fetched assumption from the game's part that I'm thinking of a Norwegian-Brazilian skier :D :D :D
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PS: I was thinking of Anders Jacobsen, BTW.
Update: Haha, played a practical joke on Akinator: beat him with Anders Jacobsen, then played again and thought of him again - guessed it correctly on the second guess (the first being another Norwegian ski jumper)...
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Promise it's the last from me today :D
I'm pretty much sure Akinator factors in where the player is playing from. I was thinking of Gabor Talmacsi, a Hungarian MotoGP racer. When the game found out my character is into motor sports, his first question was if he's from Italy - easy guess, there are a huge lot of Italians in motor sports... But then the second question was if he's from Hungary... I cannot imagine this nationality being asked second - if not for the fact that the game knew I was playing from a Hungarian IP-address...
I decided I still like this game...
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I stumped it with Daneeka L. Jones from After Tupac and D. Foster. Let me tell you, she is not Ann from the Babysitter's Club.
(Also, I love you for providing Donna Noble as an example. Spread the Who love!)
Akinator really didn't work that well for me.
Some that I used:
Rosie O'Donnell
Gene Roddenberry
Herbert Hoover
Demi Moore
Bill Clinton
Kevin Bacon
And maybe two or three more, of which Akinator correctly guessed two or three altogether. It seemed to squander a lot of its guesses. I think part of it is that I don't know enough about some of these people. Are they associated with music, or drugs, or crime? Are they of Italian descent, or British descent, or whatever? Well, not that I know of, so I put probably not. Maybe if I knew the correct answers to its questions it would guess right more often. But I still think the algorithms are a bit screwy. Could probably use some reworking to narrow the field a bit.
I remember playing Akinator a few years ago. It took him 30 something questions to guess Nathan Fillion. I'll go waste more time on him now.
Dr. Worm, you pulled out the oldie-but-goodie King's Quest IV!?
I bow in awe.
Wish I knew what happened to my copy...
HAHAAAA! I finally stumped Akinator!
His guesses:
Broly from Dragon Ball, Myotismon from Digimon, and some guy whose name I forgot from Fist of the North Star.
What he should've guessed:
Dio Brando from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure
Pity he never asked a question about whether my character
could stop time.
Might've cued him in right away.
Nevermind. I had King's Quest 6: Heir Today Gone Tomorrow.
Interesting note on the Renaissance game:
play through it on "easy" and memorize everything (appears in the same order) then play the harder levels and submit your score (can't on easy).
The level where you must find 4 people in the crowd: Jesus, some noble (specified), man pouring wine, butcher with knife; the hint only helps you find the richman.
the wine pourer is in the lower right with a big jar and the butcher is in the very back middle with a CLEAVER
That threw me off.
I stumped Akinator with Kivrin Engle, from Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, and Tohya Miho, from the webcomic Megatokyo.
Of course, it correctly guessed Pierre De Fermat(17th century French mathematician), Randall Flagg(Stephen King recurring villain) and Bill Clinton(former US president), but at least I had a small victory.
Akinator can be a bit hard to play because sometimes you just don't know everything about the character you're thinking of. That being said, it guessed Randall Munroe the second time I thought of him and Natalie Tran the first time.
Yet another programmer thinks the Control key is a good idea to use for their game that also makes heavy use of the arrow keys ... sigh.
Just because Steve Jobs hates Flash doesn't mean you're free to hate Macs, Wolfenstein 1D creators.
Guys playing Akinator,
if you don't know the answer to some of the questions but don't want to go woth "I don't know" - Google and Wiki are still your friends :)
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I lolled big time when akinator guessed that the character in my head was myself XD
Also great picture :P
Why does it usually guess Robert Guiscard?
I have been playing with Akinator twice, and he got it both times.
From the randomness of the questions, I am fairly certain that it only use data given it by the users, not google or anything like that.
He is not smart enough to know that Norwegian and Brazilian are mutually exclusive, not smart enough to know that women are refered to as "she", is in general not smart.
What he has is a lot of data given by a lot of users that a given question about a given character usually results in "Yes", other combinations give "No".
Actually you can be both Norwegian and Brazilian. In the realm of fiction pretty much nothing is mutually exclusive.
Akinator should also have the nudity warning, but you should only reach a nude image if your character is usually or is known for being naked.
Even more impressed: Akinator correctly guessed The Naughty Sorceress.
Kangra: Not sure why you're having trouble; I got through Wolfenstein 1D on my Mac laptop (control key works fine). OK, so you have to use two hands... is that the problem?
@ TheFez
I love you for choosing Charley Pollard. My all-time favourite Doctor Who companion!
Very impressed with Akinator.
Got Natalie Tran in 15 questions. SHODAN in 20. Kari Sweets in 17. The Tall Man in 15. Knives Chau in 18. Lon Chaney Jr. in 20. Zero Cool in 40. James Randi in 23. Mitsuko Souma in 40. Ichi The Killer in 20. Lola from "Run Lola Run" in 20. Chris Morris in 20. Danny Wallace in 29.
It's not perfect by any means (no Jet Girl, no Julie Walker from "Return Of The Living Dead Part 3" - although it did guess Trash from "Return Of The Living Dead" for Julie), but it's certainly impressive nonetheless. Gets a lot more right than I'd have thought from the questions.
I suspect that it weights the questions that you answer yes and no to, even if they don't fit the "correct" answer. It guessed Christopher Eccleston in 15 when I hadn't given much that could specify that it was him, as opposed to any other number of British actors. What I had said, though, which it marked as wrong was that he was "probably bald" (given that he's noted for having a closely-cropped hairdo), and that he could regenerate (he can't, of course, but the character he's probably now most famous for playing can, so I thought answering yes might help the programme to narrow it down). It said that I should have answered no to both questions, but I suspect it took the fact that I didn't into account.
Dude, so true about art. I'm excited to go to art school.
Carny Asada - Do you have Spaces enabled? Ctrl-Arrow Key is the normal mapping to change Spaces. Too easy to miss and hit that. Meta keys are a bad idea for any game to use, not just that combination.
Phoe, if you're still trying - first you have to click on the lower area to enable the weapon/armor. Then you have to click on the icon in the upper left to drop it (once its timer runs out) so the robot can pick it up. "Upgrading" just gets you faster reloading for those items. There's actually very little you can do in the game, and the interface is pretty atrocious. Yet for all that it's a distracting game and not without its charm.
Maybe I am just feeling unusually bitter and old today but how can someone be a gamer and not have played Wolfenstein3D? Don't people go back and play those classic games that were important and helped shape gaming once and a while?
Kids these days...
*grumble*
Ok. I havent tried Akinator yet, but yay for the Dr. Who reference! I love Catherine Tate.
Wow! Akinator all the way in the comments...
Agree with the one and only comment about Riddles of Renaissance: Interesting concept, but unpolished. The pictures are too small on my full HD display, but I would very much like to play something like that if it were a bit better made.
What I have always loved about Akinator is that you can do pretty recent references and he will still get it because he's community powered.
He managed to get a character from Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective on his second guess despite that it has been done only 13 times. That game came out in America only 19 days ago.
Couldn't get Dan from Iji though.
Interesting experience to Akinator.
I remember a similar implementation with items, but cannot google it. it was more open to elaborate how it was working. I find your theories how you think it is also interesting. I'm pretty sure, Akinator does not google in background, its statistics from previous players all the way. He does likely weigh in your IP location as well age and gender you provide.
The interesting thing on some Akinator plays is that it tells you more about what people are thinking of when playing Akinator. I found most characters in Comics I played, and I was first suprised to find "Thrall", a major character of world of warcraft... only to find you can find any not so important NPC as well :-/.
Also a repeating pattern if having "real, woman, actor, blond" ... the next question is always "a porn star?" :-/.
Additionally what I found somewhat uncomfortable truth, is that I mostly had to play fictional characters, as I know more about them as the average real celebrity :-/.
Also 80% of the characters you write here about I never heared of!
The major downsides of aktinator are:
* there is no semantic linking between the question. Even if I tell him, "my character is black haired", the next question will be, "is it blond?". Sometimes questions even will repeat. I guess some are in there to catch the malicous user always pressing yes/no, or alternating between the two, which sure are a high percentage of users.
* some question have "masculinism", the character is often refered as "he", altough it is said to be female.. if there is no semantic linking, it should be "it" all the way.
* I wished there was some mode to look behind the scenes, like a table which results he considers most likely at the moment, and why he picked the next question hoping to have the highest destinction.
Maybe one day I code myself a version of the guess bot. I suppose the data is to be a set of trees all the way down.
Oh yes, you can get him stumped pretty quickly when using characters from novels, with some luck he knows the main protagonist, but any side-kick is a down. I tried "Molly" from Neuromancer (its even a repeating character in a few Cyberpunk books), and was the first one to ever play her. He knew Michael Endes "Momo" but didnt guess it, but was also the very first to play "her" turtle "Cassiopaia".
Some strange things, he knew very well "HAL 9000" from Space Odyssey, but not "VIKI" from I, Robot. Which makes me guess they used historic bot data to bootstrap him. I, Robot should nowadays be far more famous, than Space Odyssey 001, not? And even after I played VIKI a few times, his first guess remained Skynet from Terminator. Altough the first question, "female", should be a clear indication its neither HAL nor Skynet.
It doesn't count as "stumping" Akinator if you answer half the questions with "I don't know."
To the person who commented on "I already said it was a real person, why would it ask me if it was a Halo character?": I'm pretty sure the program doesn't cross-reference the questions -It doesn't know that "Real" automatically must exclude "Halo." To the program, those questions are discreet pieces of information.
I think part of the reason it sometimes asks off-the-wall questions is that it knows the right answer and now it's filling in the answers to questions it hasn't ever asked about this character.
Like, if after 11 questions it figured out your character is Jack the Ripper, it will use the other 9 chances on a random set of questions it's never tried before, to see what the right answer is, and determine if any of the "new" 9 questions might be more useful than the ones it used to get to Jack this time.
Example: One of the new questions someone had just added when I played was "Does this character play the viola?" That question came up quite frequently at about the 18-19 question mark.
One of the reasons Akinator doesn't cross-reference questions is that you can submit questions yourself in relation to specific characters. It then prompts you for the answer for the character you're submitting it for and several that it considers a close match.
As far as questions filling in the time goes, I've found that it will stop answering questions at many points. Try playing with the Queen, and it should get the answer in about 12-14 questions or so. It might ask some seemingly useless questions ("does your character have a maid/butler" after already discerning that they're English, a member of the royal family, and a queen), but it doesn't seem to stop at any particular number of questions. Similarly I've had people guessed at 17, 18 and 29 questions.
Akinator seemed to have a lot of trouble on skins characters for me. It couldn't guess tony until the fifth round.
Somehow I got it to correctly guess Moggot from the Abhorsen Trilogy on the third go even though most of my answers we "red" in the details. Maybe it does read your mind.
One question that is stupid: Does your character get mistaken for a boy? What if your character IS a boy?
Holy. Wow. Akinator is mind blowingly amazing.
I tried thinking of two of the most obscure characters possible, fictional and then none fictional.
Lobot from Star Wars: correct
Mongolia President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj: correct.
I.. I'm not sure what to say.
@Johnny_S In my opinion the more obscure the character the easier for Akinator, I tried a while all kind of robots, AIs, the thing from the Adams and all the such.
A mostly average unimportant (but publicly known) guy/gal is the hardest part.
I've known about Akinator for quite a while now and always enjoy seeing if he can get my characters. Unfortunately, I was the first one to play the War Chief, Vicki, Liz Shaw, Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart (the one from Inferno), and Tremas... Come on Doctor Who fans, surely several would have at the least gone through the companion list? =P
Stumped Akinator with Donut from Red vs. Blue!
I beat the last level of Robot Clashes, no damage!
My strategy:
I maxed out my talents in weapons and offense, completely ignoring defense.
Then, I set up the upgrade strategy as follows.
- First, always upgrade as soon as one is available.
- Second, if two are available to upgrade and one isn't at level 1 yet, choose that one so you can use it right away.
- Third, if they are both new or both already available, choose weapons over armor and stronger items over weaker ones.
Then, I didn't wait to combine armor and weapons. I just dropped the crates as soon as they were made available.
Any other strategies to try?
Akinator is addictive and thorough... he got me on John Rokesmith, Lizzie Hexam, Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone (though I stumped him on Rogue Riderhood and Fascination Fledgeby). Oddly, he DIDN'T yet know Jenny Wren, who's the most well-known character from that book...
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