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Friday, July 6, 2012

Friday Links

I'm on vacation this week, so I only have two links for you.

First is a link to a video of "Starry Night" done in dominoes.  Looks nice, but I can't imagine spending that much time setting something like this up.

Next, for those of you who watched episode after episode of Dora the Explorer with your kids, then this is for you.  A  trailer for a Dora the Explorer movie.  It's a spoof, but it's funny if you remember the show at all.  If you're not familiar with the show, don't bother.

 I've saved the best for last.  My daughter clued me in to a Akinator, The Web Genius. You choose a famous person or fictional character (singer, actor, whatever), then answer twenty yes-or-no questions, and the website will attempt to guess the name of your character. Scarily accurate. It managed to figure out such unlikely characters as Steve Austin, Space Ghost, Annie Lennox, Gilligan (from Gilligan's island), Wimpy (from Popeye cartoon), Robby the Robot and many others.  The database must be huge!

What's really freaky, though, is the way it works.  Most of the questions are pretty general and when it tells you it thinks it knows who the name of your character, you often laugh and think the program can't possibly know yet -- that there must be at least a thousand people who fit the answers you gave.  So when a picture of the correct character appears on your screen, your first thought is that someone must have planted microphones next to the computer to spy on you.  Seriously freaky.  Just try it and let me know what you think.

Have a great weekend!

5 comments:

  1. Do you see Swiper? :-) Thanks for the links, Ken!

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  2. Okay, the Akinator is uncanny. 2 for 2. I'll have to add that to my Sunday Surfing links. Thanks!

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  3. I liked the dominoes better. I defeated the akinator with Mary Tyler Moore and it said she'd been played almost 6000 times.

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  4. Yes, the Akinator is not infallible, but considering the number of possible characters, it's still frighteningly accurate.

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  5. All right, I have to try that. Especially if it guessed Space Ghost.

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