In today’s Cool Tools e-zine, Kevin Kelly writes about an incredible long-term artificial intelligence project that’s been turned into a toy. The US$10-14 device is a tennis-ball-sized blue orb that plays a game of 20 questions, with uncanny results. Kevin writes:
Burned into its 8-bit chip is a neural net that has been learning for 17 years. Inventor Robin Burgener programmed a simple neural net on a DOS machine 1988. He taught it 20 questions about a cat. He than passed the program around to friends on a floppy and had them challenge the neural net with their yes/no answers to the object they had in mind. The neural net learns only when it plays a game; no data is added except for the yes/no answers of visitors. So the more people who test it, the more they teach it. In 1995 Burgener put the now robust neural net onto the new web where anyone could play it (that is, train it) 24 hours a day. And they did. Burgener’s genius was to turn the hard tedious work of training a neural net into a fun game for humans.
I tried the Web-based version and was blown away. It guessed “cresent wrench” in twelve questions, “kiwi fruit” in sixteen. You can buy it for $14 on Amazon, but find it as low as ten at other retailers.