20 Questions

20Q.net - Play 20 Questions against the computer with this artificial intelligence version of Twenty Questions. "Everything that it knows and all questions that it asks were entered by people playing the Game." (The computer is well trained. Try real tough ones and you will be surprised with how it narrows it down).

Game theory suggests that the information (as measured by Shannon's entropy statistic) required to identify an arbitrary object is about 20 bits. The game is often used as an example when teaching people about information theory . Mathematically, if each question is structured to eliminate half the objects, twenty questions will allow the questioner to distinguish between 2²⁰ or 1,048,576 objects. Accordingly, the most effective strategy for Twenty Questions is to ask questions that will split the field of remaining possibilities roughly in half each time. The process is analogous to a binary tree search algorithm in computer science.

---

Post a Comment