If you don't want anybody (or anything) to know what is going on in your mind, you had better not buy a 20Q . The toy will be available soon in Hong Kong. It looks very innocent there on the shelf. It is round and about the size of a small, squashed ball. But looks can be deceptive. This mind-blowing gadget can read your mind.
Don't worry. There is nothing sinister about the 20Q. Getting it to read your mind is like playing an exciting game of 20 Questions with a misshapen blue apple. You think of an object, the 20Q asks you a series of questions and then it guesses the object you have in mind. Amazingly, it is almost always correct and you are left wondering 'How did it do that?'
The names of more than 2,000 everyday objects are stored in the 20Q's memory along with 160 questions that it can ask you. Nobody likes to be beaten by a plastic ball, so let us try again and see if it can guess correctly again. Yes, it can.
The brain-box behind the 20Q is Canadian software wizard Robin Burgener. The 20Q combines two of Robin's passions. He has always been fascinated by word games and when he was growing up his family spent long hours solving word puzzles.
By the time he was in his teens, Robin was well into computers and he was developing his own software by the age of 12. In 1988, he came up with a game that brought together his love of word games and his interest in computers.
He had studied a game involving the names of animals that the computer identified after a series of questions with yes and no answers. He thought he could do better than this and he devised a matrix that connected every object in the game's memory with every question his program asked.