Akinator, the web genius - Time Waster

There's something of a minor craze about this thing called Akinator lately. It's been popping up on Delicious and it's all over my RSS feeds. But what the heck is it? Akinator is a guessing game. You think of a famous person, and it asks you questions and makes a guess about who you're thinking of.

There are plusses and minuses to Akinator's popularity. On the plus side, all the data it has collected makes it surprisingly good at guessing some pretty obscure celebrities. Akinator has successfully guessed everyone from Britney Spears to 80's prog-rocker John Petrucci to various literary characters and ... Pokémon? It's that good. The downside to Akinator's high traffic is that it's sometimes excruciatingly slow. To remedy this, Akinator currently only allows 1500 players at once, and it's almost always full.

Tags: Akinator, game, guessing