semanticvoid

Robin Burgener, the inventor of 20q started working on 20Q in 1988, with the game running on a 5/14 inch floppy disk. Now 20q is online and over 10,000 games are played each day – increasing the sophistication of the 20q network on a daily basis.The artificial intelligence behind the game is a neural-network, similar to a human brain.

A brain, or neural-network, is built from neurons connected by synaptic connections. A human brain has about one hundred trillion synaptic connections. The 20q.net currently has about ten million. The game uses the neural-network to choose the next question as well as deciding what to guess.

Try it out yourself and you’ll be amazed. Play it here.

AskJeeves was the first search engine to support natural language queries. Their natural language processing is based on a predefined set of question templates as per which the results are obtained.

But BrainBoost goes one step ahead. It analyzes the queries at runtime converting them into a number of other question based queries in order to find the most revelant match. After having obtained the matching documents it parses the document content inorder to extract the answer to the actual query question.

In this respect it can be termed as an answer engine rather than a search engine. It states that the search results are sorted by their proprietry AnswerRank™ algorithm.

The difference between BrainBoost and any other search engine like Google is as follows:

GoogleUser types in : “Why is mars red”

• Google Search engine retrieves all pages containing words “mars” and red”.
• Search results are sorted by the number of links each one of them got from other pages. This is a good way to figure out which one of them is most trusted by others.
• Results are displayed with the snippet being the appearance of the question on the pages.
• Typically, a user would then click on the first search result, read through the document and hope to find an answer.If an answer is not found within the first search result, the user needs to repeat this process with the next search result, sometimes having to read many web pages to finally get at the answer.

BrainboostUser types in : “Why is mars red”

• Brainboost translates the query into multiple queries that will raise the probability of finding the ANSWER to the question.
• Brainboost retrieves search engine results.
• Brainboost retrieves top several hundred pages and reads them. Brainboost finds answers and ranks them based on it’s proprietary AnswerRank™ technology.
• AnswerRank™ knows to look at a set of many possible answers and rank them as to which one is probably the most correct. In this case: “Mars is red because of the iron in the soil” Brainboost displays the ANSWERS to the user

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BrainBoost thus extracts the piece of information being searched rather than relaying this work to the end user to search the matching documents for the information.