So, I decided to throw some Sentinels characters at the Akinator to see if it could figure them out. I was thinking of Chrono-granger when it asked me, "Is this character from a comic book?"
I wasn't sure how to answer that. Does it count if he's from a comic book that doesn't exist?
Huh. I got to around question 80 with Legacy when it suddenly guessed "Foreskin Man". I figured it would try to self learn at some point, but whatever.
Ahh, good old Akinator...my dad first showed me this a few years ago and every now and then I go back and play around some more. I tried Akash'Bhuta once and he didn't guess that, lol. But mostly he's pretty good. I try to think of obscure characters only to have him guess them in, like, eight questions or something :D.
The first one I did was the Doctor. He guessed the 11th Doctor which I opted to give him. I wasn't thinking of any specific incarnation, and so I felt it best to let him have a win.
The truth is, it goes through the questions and then you tell it the answer if it failed. So it should only really ever fail once. Until the sparse question and answer database becomes not-sparse, in which case he will fail on any questions that fall in the not-sparse area most of the time.
Doesn't that work of a simple flow? Each question leads to the next until it either guesses right or guesses wrong and you add a new question and name to the list.
It should only be wrong when you answer wrong or it hasn't encountered that character yet.
It has a maximum number of questions, correct? If not, then it can guess everythin correctly eventually. If it does have a max then eventually the question strings will end with multiple answers for the same string. And then the guesses can be wrong.
I love how we rediscover these kinds of things every few years…
Yeah, I think it's a basic learning AI (although I don't think "AI" is very accurate in this context). Probably a lot faster and with greater capabilities than the older versions, but the concept has been entertaining (while supporting AI research) for a long time.
If he doesn't guess it after three guesses, it'll show you a list and ask if your character is on it - if not, you can add it to the database yourself by just entering the name of the character and their source material.