Twenty Questions

This completely blew my mind. 20Q.net is a neural-net based game of twenty questions which has been building its knowledge base for something like 17 years. I've played it three times and it successfully guessed what I was thinking of each time ("shoelace", "juggling club", "pacifier"). My jaw dropped and I spun my office chair in awe.

I found this via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools blog where he shows off the portable version of this game. The Cool Tools site is worth following, it only has 2-4 posts per week and the write-ups on the tools are good reading.

The Cool Tools piece gives more history of 20q than I could find on the 20q site itself. However, when I googled for the creator's name, Robin Burgener, I found this article which gives some more details.