Explain Like I'm Five is the best forum and archive on the internet for layperson-friendly explanations. Don't Panic!
Archived post. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast.
Sort by:
Best
Open comment sort options
Best
Top
New
Controversial
Old
Q&A
It's a Guess-Who style program. The program has a list of characters, and each character has a set of values (boy or girl, from a game/show/book/movie, etc) The program asks for user prompts, and as soon as the program has narrowed it down to one likely choice, it outputs the character.
The nature of user input means that the program can calibrate its results or adjust the values for each character as more and more people use the program.
It's not intuitive, but a logical program can draw a lot of conclusions just from a few select questions. It might look like it has a huge amount of options stored, but if you ask the right questions, you can easily derive a quick answer by combining the input and looking it up on a database.
It's a problem that's really easy for computers, but harder for humans.
And of course it "learns" from user inputs. Like if you answer 10 questions and in the end say you were thinking about person X, Arkinator can then connect these answers to person X, even if he didn't know them before. So you actually make him better just by playing.