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Portables (Games) Entertainment Games

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral - Portable? 33

Posted by simoniker from the are-you-a-slashdot-article? dept.
Thanks to GameGossip for reprinting a press release announcing Radica's forthcoming portable electronic game called 20Q, licensed from the 20Q.net website. The game seeks to guess an object you're thinking of by asking you 20 questions, starting with "Is it classified as Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other or Unknown?" The site is billed as "The neural-net on the Internet", and since it's claimed that "20Q.net is a learning system; the more it is played, the smarter it gets", it'll be interesting to see if Radica's portable version tries to incorporate any learning attributes.
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Animal, Vegetable, Mineral - Portable? More

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral - Portable?

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  • It would lose its edge if it didn't have learning capabilities. Otherwise it would be completely random.

  • Oldest game ever! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This game is the oldest game ever - and its so-called "learning" is the only reason it was ever written. I remember typing this in in BASIC on a Sharp-MZ80K back in the '80s, and it was as old as the hills then because the book I got the listing from was a book of listings for some oddball minicomputer my Mum used to write training software for. What's next, a Slashdot Games article about this thrilling new portable game called "Adventure" that may incorporate exciting natural-language recognition technolog

    • I remember typing this in in BASIC on a Sharp-MZ80K back in the '80s, and it was as old as the hills then because the book I got the listing from was a book of listings for some oddball minicomputer my Mum used to write training software for.

      We had to write an learning animal guessing game of this style for an assignment on tree structures for our algorithms and data structures paper at university. Of course with a quick few modifications it was turned into the lecturer guessing game:

      Is your lecturer

      • And of course, if you stump it, you get to add a discriminating question. It's very easy to make up questions that while technically true, don't help the learning aspect. (Think "Is it a turnip?" with the answer "no" for the animal "camel".)

    • Re:Oldest game ever! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Monday November 03, 2003 @08:57AM (#7376827) Journal
      This game is the oldest game ever.

      and not only that, the "learning" isn't anything more adding a discriminator a search tree.

      The original used a binary search tree -- each parent question branched to two child nodes, one for "Yes" answers, one for "No" answers.

      The version at 20q.net uses a tree where each node has six children (Yes, No, Unknown, Irrelevant, Probably, Doubtful), and makes "guesses" probably based on some accumulation of -- I'm just guessing myself here -- the fuzzier (neither "Yes" nor "No") answers.

      So it just classifies human knowledge, and -- big surprise -- it gets "confused" where reasonable people disagree about what attributes the guessed-at object has.

      So it's nothing revolutionary technically.

      And there's no reason to make it into a single-use portable, given that it could be programmed for any existing portable -- Palm Pilot, Zaurus, Gameboy -- limited only by the size of the database said portable could accommodate. The whole point of Turing machines is that they can be any (programmable) machine -- why this should be a stand-alone, other than because marketing thinks it would sell, I have no idea. (Maybe they can sell stand-alone tic-tac-toe machines too?)

      And it's no breakthrough epistemologically: schemes for the classification of all human knowledge have been a hobby-horse of talented zealots at least since the Enlightenment (and come to think of it, wasn't that what St. Thomas Aquinas was up to too?).

      Roget's Thesaurus is an example of one of the few classifications of knowledge to actually be useful, but let's not forget various plans by various philosophers to create artificial languages based on "natural" taxonomies of knowledge, or "mathematical" systems encompassing all knowledge, with syntax that would make false statements impossible, and other grandiose plans.

      So far, these plans have all foundered on disagreement between reasonable men over what the boundaries and connections between concepts "really" are, and difficulties dealing with different domains of knowledge, to the point that most if not all have had little practical use (Roget's being useful not for its original purpose, an exhaustive classification of everything, but instead as a catalog of synonyms and antonyms best employed by poets and rhetoricians, not scientists or philosophers.)

      Of course, just because it's neither new nor particularly noteworthy, does not mean that the US Patent Office might not grant it a patent. But that's another problem altogether.

      • Re:Oldest game ever! (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        So far, these plans have all foundered on disagreement between reasonable men over what the boundaries and connections between concepts "really" are

        Well, 20 Questions usually founders like this:

        Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?

        Animal.

        Is it taller than my Mum?

        No.

        Sqyugrhnuevuievio?

        Yes.

        HA HA THIS GAME SUCKS?

        No.

        Is it a peepee?

        No.

        What was it?

        U R DUM.

        Please input a question that would distinguish a peepee from a U R DUM:

        0wned.

        • Not to mention that 20Q falls down when a word has more than one meaning. Take, for instance, "transformer"; depending upon your upbringing, you might immediately think "electrical device that changes voltage levels", or, you may think "robot in disguise".

          20Q has no way to differentiate the two, and will just swing back and forth between the two confusedly, probably arriving at some weird algamation between the two.
      • and not only that, the "learning" isn't anything more adding a discriminator a search tree.

        Have you used 20Q.net? The thing is certainly not the binary-tree-in-BASIC you're thinking of. It gets the right answer before you think it could possibly know. They've tuned this algorithm over several years, and it's smart.
    • I remember typing this in from the manual for my Sinclair ZX spectrum [madhippy.com]. I'm sure it was quite exciting at the time but it doesn't seem to have much more than nostalgia value these days.

  • Half interesting (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Althazzar ( 313749 )
    This portable version, even with learning features in it, will still be half as nice as the website version, since the web-version can learn from a lot more tries then the portable version.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It is neat, but this is what happens when you let "people" fool with the system:

      Uncommon Knowledge about a grapefruit
      Does it come in different colors? I say Yes.
      Would you use it daily? I say Probably.
      Is it a predator? I say Probably.
      Is it originally from Europe? I say Probably.
      Does it have paws? I say Yes.
      Is it made from cellulose? I say Probably.
      Is it delivered? I say Yes.
      Can it growl? I say Yes.
      Would you touch it with a 10-foot pole? I say Doubtful.
      Was it ever alive? I say No.
      Does it come in many varieti
      • yeah... gotta love those sad killer phone numbers... point claws, geological features, and all:

        Uncommon Knowledge about a phone number
        Can it be used for recreation? I say Yes.
        Do you know any songs about it? I say Yes.
        Is it a geological feature? I say Yes.
        Does it cry? I say Probably.
        Would you find it on a farm? I say Yes.
        Can it speak? I say Probably.
        Can it add? I say Probably.
        Does it have a horn? I say Yes.
        Does it have four wheels? I say Probably.
        Is it smart? I say Probably.
        Can it swim? I say Probably.
        Doe

  • It's really good (Score:3, Funny)

    by DarkGreenNight ( 647707 ) on Monday November 03, 2003 @09:33AM (#7376977)
    After the initial training period it allways guesses what I'm thinking about at the first try!
    Are you thinking about Angelina Jolie?

    Damn! Here it goes again!

    No, I haven't RTFA

  • I'm not sure how... (Score:3, Funny)

    by presearch ( 214913 ) * on Monday November 03, 2003 @09:48AM (#7377048)
    but it needs a tie-in with Google.

  • its borken (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ArmorFiend ( 151674 )
    The entire point of 20 questions is that they have to be yes/no questions. These guys break that rule on their first question, "Is it classified as Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other or Unknown?". If one is allowed to break the rules in this way, then the first question should always be: "What is it?", followed immediately by victory for the questioner.
    • The entire point of 20 questions is that they have to be yes/no questions. These guys break that rule on their first question, "Is it classified as Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Other or Unknown?"

      I don't know about you, but the traditional 'first question' in 20 questions is the "animal, vegetable, or mineral" question. Granted, they stretch it a bit by adding Other and Unknown, but it's still in the traditional spirit of the game.
      • If we can stretch yes/no to n-way multiple choice, then a good first question is: which entry in this book (gesture at encyclopedia britannica) best describes it?
        • You don't get it. It's a part of the game, and the only N-way question they ask is that one.

          Plus, 20Q is tuned to answer yes-no questions, and it doesn't get much information from the first one.

          • You don't get it. It's a part of the game, and the only N-way question they ask is that one.

            Plus, 20Q is tuned to answer yes-no questions, and it doesn't get much information from the first one.

            Uh, in the best case, they get log(N) questions for the price of one, where N is the number of multiple choice options, and the log is base 2, of course. Around HERE, serious players are made to start with
            1) is it mineral?
            2b) is it animal?

            For their expanded, illegal first question, you'd do something like
            1) is

  • I was thinking of SCO - and it guessed:

    I am guessing that it is a urinal?

    It wasn't that far out, was it?

    YAW.
  • Pretty much anything I picked that wasn't an animal, vegetable or mineral, I won. One time I was thinking of a drum and it said cuckoo clock. Oh well, out of all the objects in the world I don't think you can get them all in just 20 questions.
  • The best part of the site is "Spontaneous knowledge" - when it gains just enough information to cross some threshold and draw its own conclusions about an object (which is usually not the object you had as your answer). At the end of the game, it tells you all of these conclusions.

    For example, I played it with the answer "a search engine". Here's what it concluded:

    The mandelbrot set is probably not made of plastic
    The mandelbrot set probably doesn't live in the desert
    You might not wear the mandelbrot set
  • For all those ./ comments that say the internet is mostly used for prOn.
    I played a game where the word I thought of was "pussy" and the guesses? 1) Software, 2) Internet

    Scary...
  • Chemeolithotropesp Nope Sex Robot

    Nope Time machine

    Nope

    What use is this thing?

  • "Very heavy server load; access may be denied"
  • The site is amazing. I was thinking about a vibrator...and eventually it gave me this [20q.net]. And while ultimately it did not say that it was a vibrator...it then has at the bottom of this [20q.net] page some uncommon info about a vibrator. Scary? Yes. Endlessly amusing? WIthout a doubt.

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