20Q - a harbinger of ChatGPT

In 2005 I bought a little toy called 20Q. It’s seems to be able to work out what you are thinking off. It asks 20 questions and then makes a guess. If it gets it wrong it asks 5 more and then tries again. Today we managed to beat it by thinking of “coffee table”. It thought we meant “whiteboard”. So it’s not perfect. But it is darned impressive. And around 20 years ago it was even more so. Of course its not clever. It uses a neural net that was derived from users who logged onto a website to play the game. The developers managed to cram enough of the questions and answers they had harvested from the site into the device to make it work.

I don’t recall it being that much of a sensation when it came out, but it is very interesting to compare it with ChatGPT. Both devices take in lots of information and then respond to queries about it. Both give you the impression that they know what is going on, when really they don’t.

You can’t buy 20Q devices any more, but you can play online and there is also a mobile application. I got out our original device which still works really well and really impressed a certain six year old of our acquaintance.