Last week I was rummaging through some unpacked boxes from my move and stumbled across an unopened 20Q game. I had originally purchased it for one of my kids and had forgotten to wrap it as a Christmas gift last year. While I’ve been playing with the little $10.00 gadget I’ve been ruminating about the underlying technology that makes it possible.
Most of you are probably asking yourselves, “why is he writing about a kids game?” Those of you without young kids are also probably wondering what is a 20Q game. 20Q is a spherical electronic toy that promises to guess an item the user is thinking of in twenty questions or less. Although the questions seem irrelevant and kind of offbeat, most of the time it guesses correctly.
My curiosity has been how the game works and if the technology used in this simple toy has been applied to bigger, more important things. I did a little fun research on the toy first and found the company was more than gracious to provide information about the underlying technology. I had imagined a huge database of yes/no answers that eventually pointed to the object. Boy was I wrong.
20Q.net, Inc., the company that manufacturers the game, explained the concept used to create the toy is actually based on artificial intelligence (AI). Initial research behind the toy was done with specially designed computer software that had users input approximately one million series of guesses. With the data the software collected, it learned how users would respond to certain questions and based its answer on that data. Current research is done through the company’s website 20Q.net using an online version of the software.
Such a novelty is using this sophisticated approach so I wondered how else this can be implemented. After all, AI basically functions like the human brain. The research used to create the game is a collection of learned responses that, once logged, can make rational decisions based on inputs.
Artificial intelligence has been applied to real situations for years and is nothing new. Banks have used it for predicting finances. Hospitals have used AI for everything from prescribing medicine to scheduling doctors. Big businesses that provide online and telephone based customer support have used AI to supplement human technicians. Even the publishing industry makes use of AI for specific topics like sports summaries and business analyses.
Though it seems like computers have the potential to take over the world and society, it’s still humans that created the technology behind the AI. For every robot there’s an incredibly long series of human-written algorithms behind the scenes. If the human writer does not write the software correctly, the AI will not work correctly and whatever process the robot was designed to replicate will not be correct. That may be fine for a children’s game, but filling prescriptions is another story.
One of my good friends went on to program AI after college. One of the jobs he secured along the way was creating a computer program that would predict the settings for a dish washer. He and his team based the settings on the weight of the dishes, number of times the door was opened between cycles and a host of other parameters. His own test machine, which he installed at his house, failed because his eighteen month old baby continuously opened and closed the door.
Most of us have dealt with AI at one point or another. Even if you don’t own the 20Q game, chances are you are surrounded by technology that was designed to make smart choices for you. How you make use of this technology is another story. In the meantime, I’m going to get back to my little game and see how many times I can stump the computer.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can text him at (978) 413-2840 or call him directly at (978) 919-8059.)