What kind of algorithm is behind the Akinator game?
algorithm, artificial-intelligence, machine-learning, statistics
Solution
Yes, there is a name for these class of algorithms - it is called classification algorithms in the field of machine learning. Decision trees is one example for classification algorithm.
In this classification problem, the features for the algorithm are the answers to the question.
Deciding which question should be asked next can be done in various ways - for example by trying to maximize the predicted (or mean) entropy from the next question.
Problem
It always amazed me how the Akinator app could guess a character by asking just several questions. So I wonder what kind of algorithm or method let it do that? Is there a name for that class of algorithms and where can I read more about them?