I'm playing Akinator.
It's really unnerving when it gets to those last 3 questions or so and I know that it knows. I think it's learning what kinds of things I'll input as well. It's been asking me about videogames almost straight away now, and after trying 3 relatively obscure CoC characters in a row, it got them in fewer questions each time.
I think it develops general patterns. I haven't dug into the code or anything, but I think it takes a record of every answer used to describe a character, and uses those to help choose it's next questions.
Like, it always starts with a "boy or girl" question of some sort, which eliminates about half of the possibilities right off the bat. Then it chooses a slightly more specific question for #2, and so on and so forth until it has a (near) perfect match/matches and makes a guess. Though, many characters will have different answers for the same question, and that is factored in more or less depending on the balance between the answers. It also seems to try and zero in on more popular characters first, and gets increasingly obscure (to Aikinator, anyways) if it doesn't pan out. If Aikinator gives up entirely, you have the option to enter a new entry into his database or manually sift through it to find what you were looking for.
Goddammit, Florida.
She was sick of Bugs' shit. If Elmer couldn't do it, she was going to do it.
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I say we do that with California.