Ness26 posted...
The Akinator actually doesn't use a decision tree -- if he used a tree then if you answered one question wrong he wouldn't be able to get the answer right. He uses a matrix where each question is weighted differently for different characters, and then at the end he picks the character that is most consistent with all of the answers given thus far. Based on how people have answered over time, he can adjust the weights to continually get more accurate.
He picks his questions by finding questions that split the set of characters he's considering most closely to 50/50. So when he asks things like "Is the character from Final Fantasy?" it's because that question narrows down the field of answers more than any other question. If there are that many FF characters in the database I feel like the question is fair.
http://www.mikiko.net/library/weekly/1998articles/aa090698.htm
Huh, that's pretty cool. I hadn't heard of that method.
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senorhousemouse