20Q.net

When 20Q makes note of some contradictions at the end of the game, it is merely giving you a peek into its state of mind with regard to the object you played. Since 20Q learns everything it knows from the people who play, it is dealing with opinions, not facts. It's more like a folk taxonomy. Folk taxonomies are generated from social knowledge and... are used in everyday speech. As noted in Wikipedia: "They are distinguished from scientific taxonomies that claim to be disembedded from social relations and thus objective and universal." Since the opinions of people often differ, 20Q must do its best to sort out conflicting information. Contradictions are also one of the main ways that 20Q learns more about something. If enough people contradict what it currently thinks, it slowly changes its mind about that subject and eventually the contradictions will no longer happen. Why does 20Q ask unrelated questions? Let's say, for example, that you are playing Twenty Questions with 20Q and it seems to be asking somewhat relevant questions and then, out of the blue, it asks a question that is completely unrelated. When 20Q picks a new question, it uses the answers you have given it and looks for probable objects. It then looks at its knowledge of those objects to determine which question would rule out as many objects as possible. Sometimes 20Q will find a question for which it has very few answers; it may ask one of these questions to fill-in the knowledgebase. The bottom line is, the question may seem obviously unrelated to you, however, 20Q wants to ask the question, since that's how it learns. Why won't 20Q learn my object? If at the end of a game, 20Q doesn't know your object, you may have an opportunity to provide it.Read More