This program that guesses what person, real or fictional, you’re thinking of (CHT Neil Gaiman) is pretty eerie until you figure out how it works. (Hint: it will get more and more accurate over time.)
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
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I’m guessing maybe it uses previous information other players have entered? By the time I had got it to guess a Russian female writer who lived in the 20th century united states it guessed Ayn Rand on the second try.
It does have some fairy suspicious behavior; I only gave answers that could describe Socrates, Aristotle, or Plato, and of the three it guessed Socrates the first try.
Ok, it guessed R. Daneel Olivaw with impressively few questions.
Another note: it doesn’t go strictly by your answers (you may say female and it will still guess a male or vice versa); I’d guess it goes by overall correlation, i.e., it will guess the person for whom the average answers of others have the highest overall correlation with yours.
Yes that’s what I was implying; it also relies on people entering in their character once they have defeated it. I beat it just now by using a minor character from a TV show, although its guess was surprisingly close (a related character from the same TV show).
And it also relies on people telling the truth and not messing with it.
a related character from the same TV show
I tried Ken MacLeod and got Iain Banks.
I was surprised when it got David Lynch on the first try, but I defeated it with El Topo.
I was thinking of Immanuel Kant and it gave me Friedrich Nietzsche, even though I told it no mustache. Also I didn’t know whether Kant had ever killed anyone. And I said he was “ugly and nasty,” though really I was just thinking of his prose.
It’s basically just a specialized version of 20Q…
Ha! Not only did it guess wrong three times for Benjamin Disraeli before it gave up, offering Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning and Lord Dunsany even though it had been told he was a 19th century British Prime Minister of Jewish origins, it had the nerve to claim it had been pretty close. It seems its early question whether he was a writer confused it permanently.
“Pretty close” means your choice was on the long list he gives you at the end.
Had it been a short list, that claim would have been justified; as it was, it was absurdly arrogant on the part of the site’s designers.
No, no, it’s just their fictional character who’s arrogant.