Epistemographer

At a cafe tonight, I noticed a bulletin board posting advertising a pocket-sized electronic game that would play twenty questions, which reminded me of an online artificial intelligence experiment that plays a spookily accurate game of twenty questions about which I blogged a year and a half ago.

When I got home I did a little bit of research, and it turns out that they’re related, and that the former is in fact an implementation of the latter (seems like a licensed snapshot of the neural net at a given moment). This seems absolutely brilliant – the manufacturers got hundreds thousands of people to collaboratively develop a very sophisticated knowledge base, which they’re (the manufacturers) now licensing to whomever they can.

There’s a lesson in this somewhere…