Chances are, you’ve seen the hand-held game 20Q in stores. It’s a neat little device programmed with tons of questions and answers. You think of a person, place, or thing, and it tries to guess what you’re thinking of. These have been around for a few years now and are very popular. I bought one as a present when they first came out and tested it– I was surprised by how accurate it was.

A Trekkie’s dream come true, a Trek-themed 20Q is in development, and you can play it online for free until the producers have decided the AI is ready to build the handheld version. Go to 20Q.net and try it for yourself. I’ve played it a few times, and it’s pretty good, but it has a long way to go. It knows things from all five series and the movies, and not only does it guess based on the way people have previously answered questions, it also lets you put in new terms if you were thinking of something it hadn’t. If you’re a big enough Trekkie to spend time playing it enough, you could have a very large impact on the program.

I’m really happy to see this being developed. We play a similar game in my weekly Trek club called “Is It Bigger Than a Standard Replicator?” I’ve found that Trek has a vast amount of terms that it’s great for this sort of game. According to 20Q.net, it’s one of only four 20Qs being made about other specific lisenced franchises. The others are The Simpsons, Harry Potter, and Disney. I don’t know if they have plans for others, but it’s fantastic that Star Trek got in so quickly. I would have expected Star Wars to get one more quickly, since it’s generally more highly commercialized. I’m also very happy it will include all of Trek canon and not just the original series. I know many Trekkies are only fans of one series or another, but for someone like me who sees Trek as one vast universe, rather than separate series (though TNG will forever be my favorite among them) the game will be far more fun.

I’ll definitely be getting one of these little devices when it comes to stores. I just hope the kinks in the AI are worked out by then so that it can guess Berlinghoff Rasmussen in less than 27 turns.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Tags: 20 questions, 20q, Games, mind games, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, word games

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under Capt Logan, Star Trek, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.