Akinator is a mysterious all-knowing genie, that somehow manages to guess exactly who you're thinking of by asking you a series of questions. Before becoming an app, Akinator was an online website with a similar purpose. Apparently it was really big but I somehow managed to miss it. In fact, I've tried it out on many of my friends and neither of them had heard of it before. Regardless, the iPhone app for Akinator has slowly been climbing the best selling list, and it truly deserves to do so. For the small number of questions it asks, it really manages to narrow the search down quite precisely. After hundreds of tries, I have been able to stump it a few times but that's only when I chose very obscure characters. And even then, as time goes on, Akinator will continue to increase it's database until it truly becomes all knowing! This really comes to show the power of technology though, it's actually eerie how Akinator jumps to just the right conclusions sometimes. At one point my friends and I were wondering if the mic on the iPhone somehow communicated answers to the iPhone.

So how does the Akinator work? Basically, as I've mentioned it plays a game of 20 questions with you. It will only ask you Yes or No questions, and you can respond with the following 5 options:

Yes

No

I Don't Know

Probably

Probably Not

You can choose a character that is either a real living person, like a celebrity or something, or a fictional character from a TV show, book, etc... You need to know enough about your character however, to answer the questions accurately, to an extent. You can get away with a few "I don't knows" and "probablys" here and there, but you need to be able to answer the questions for the most part. The questions themselves are fairly straightforward anyway so it isn't too difficult answering them. Here are a few examples of exactly the process Akinator goes through to reach it's conclusion: