I don’t know how it did it, but the web based genie at Akinator.com guessed that I was thinking about Boo Radley in 20 questions, despite never asking a question that I thought was all that relevant to the character at hand. I was impressed.
Akinator came to my attention thanks to the good folks at the new site GeekWeek.com, and I have spent some time trying to stump that genie. I actually did get him – he couldn’t guess Caesar from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, but his wrong answer was Cornelius, so that’s pretty damn close. It got RJ McReady in a handful of questions, none of which seemed particularly germane. I’m sure there’s a basic information sciences answer to how this is so good, but I prefer to subscribe to the theory of magic.