Deliciously Stephy

Sith Sense

November 17th, 2005

Here’s an interesting website by Burger King:
www.sithsense.com (I love this domain!!)

Darth Vader claimed he would see your mind in 20 questions. You just have to think of a general object, not something so specific like a cup of non-fat Latte — extra hot with hazelnut syrup; and then answer him at most 20 questions; then he would figure out the object in your mind.

In my first attempt to challenge Vader, I tried Rubik’s Cube.

Darth Vader asked me questions like if it was colourful; if I used it in the public; if it fitted into an envelope, etc; and my answers could be Yes, No, Maybe , Sometimes, Depends, or Irrelevant. Surprisingly, Vader made his frist guess in his 12th question, and it was right !!!!!!!!

I really didn’t expect that he would have it figured out, at least not in 12 questions.

Chap tried squirrel; Darth Vader figured it out in about 19 questions.

My brother tried cat , and the answer was out in just a few questions.

Since Rubik’s Cube obviously is not as common as squirrel and cat, I thought Vader wouldn’t be able to figure it out. Therefore, I was really shock when he got it right so fast.

Later, my brother suggested us try nail. We did, and Vader didn’t get it until his 31st question.

His first guess was claw. We answered Close, and then he went on asking a few more questions before making his second attempt. This time he guessed toenail. We didn’t say Yes; instead, we answered Close. We expected that he would make his third guess as fingernail in the next question, but somehow he went back to ask a few irrelevant questions before finally guessing fingernail.

Later my brother tried SH*T; and Vader never got it. He made many guesses but none was relevant to sh*t. Chap said, they may discard Sh*t from the database on purpose; or……I’m thinking …. they only have formal words(nouns) in the database.

Anyway, this then comes to the logic behind this whole guessing your mind thing.

My brother said there was a database behind. Well, obviously yes; and I think: this database probably contains hundreds of thousands of objects and many many questions that would help the program determine the object in your mind.

Besides, each object has its own answers to all the questions; so everytime you answer a question, the program narrows down the number of possibilities by taking out objects that have the same answer to that particular question and copying them to another set called say, “possible answers”.

In addition, the next question you will be asked will be determined by examining this set of possible objects; and statistics are probably involved in determining what Vader should guess first if there are still more than one objects in the “possible” set (coz obviously, you can’t narrow down to only one object in the possible set as there are hundreds of thousands of objects in the database but you can only ask a limited number of questions.) As you may know, Google uses a lot of statistics to make the “hit” rate of its search engine higher.

Well well well, I guess it’s enough for my ramblings. Let me know if you have any ideas as to how this game works and how the objects and their answers to the questions were first put into the database.

If all objects were entered to the database by humans, it sure was a painful task. Moreover, our brain is not powerful enough to come up with all hundreds of thousands of objects in a “reasonable” period of time; so I’m wondering if the database gets all its data by parsing a English dictionary, some newspaper and some useful text documents and getting all the nouns that exist in today’s English language.

Afterwards, humans come in and check what nouns should stay in the datebase as possible objects that people would have in mind; and parsing newspaper and contents of websites may give the program a hint of what objects would have a higher probabilities of being hit because people tend to think of what always appears in their daily lives recently.

Oops! Time to go. Have a good evening!

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