Can a Website Guess the Movie You are Thinking About?

That is exactly what a website called Filmillion promised to do. What the software on the site does is ask you 30 questions based on the movie. Some of them are general while others may be a bit more revealing. Based on your answers the website then picks a movie which it feels you are thinking about.

Of course it is not fool proof and while it may work well for the better known block busters, it was not able to pick out Herbie, the movie I chose. However it did get me thinking about the programming effort that must have gone into the website’s software. A fair amount of research must have been needed to pick out all the most popular movies in major genres and add them to the software.

In fact when I revealed that the name of the movie was incorrect, I was asked to add the new name along with its IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base) reference. That means its a program that is building on itself as it goes along. This is so much like science in its purest form. Each new discovery leads to the next science project and technology improves by leaps and bounds.