He's of the colour of the nutmeg. And of the heat of the ginger.... he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him, but only in patient stillness while his rider mounts him; he is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts. ~William Shakespeare, Henry V

Thursday, December 29, 2005

QUESTION ABOUT ANIMAL, VEGETABLE, OR MINERAL

I have decided to throw a question of my own out here to everyone in blog world since it has been a while since Doug has given everyone something to ponder.

Mr Toast has the once-ever-popular Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral game on his blog. I have to admit that I played the game off his link more than a few times. Face it, who hasn't when they went and checked it out.

Now maybe Doug and Mr. Toast could help me with this...

I was reading The Chronicles of Narnia, one of the gifts that I got from Darren as a Christmas present, and in the very last paragraph of chapter ten "The First Joke and Other Matters" a bulldog asks Uncle Andrew "Now Sir, are you animal, vegetable, or mineral?" and right away I thought of the game. I have no clue where the game originated and I don't feel like taking the time to google it. Is it possible that the game originated from one of the Chronicle books or is it coincidence?

posted by Janelle @ 10:35 AM  

5 Comments:

  • At December 29, 2005 at 6:07 PM, Blogger BoneDaddy said…

    Okay, I'll bite.
    It's actually just a standard version of 20 Question. The actual origin isn't clear, but in 1952, there was a UK gameshow called Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?. In 1978, some dude designed a BASIC program that was oddly enough really good at the game. 1988, different program, different programmer, same game. 1996, it's made available on the web.
    Yeah, yeah, I Googled it. But I had to look at like 3 or 4 different sites to get it all, so there.

     

  • At December 29, 2005 at 6:18 PM, Blogger BoneDaddy said…

    As for the meaning of the bulldog's question, I have no idea. I found a pretty good paper on it, but it talked a lot about Lewis's interests in epistemology, his spiritual concerns, and the ability to "know" (more in reference to why everyone but the uncle understood the animals).
    here's the link to read if you want. I didn't have the patience.
    Hope that all helps!

    http://www.narniaweb.com/content.asp?id=16&cat=2

     

  • At December 31, 2005 at 12:45 AM, Blogger April said…

    I'm obsessed with that thing that Mr. Toast posted on his site... OBSESSED

     

  • At January 2, 2006 at 1:33 AM, Blogger Mr. Toast said…

    We got pretty obsessed with it at Christmas ourselves. As soon as one of the kids would put it down, one of us "grown-ups" would grab it and start playing! I wasn't even aware of the web site (20q.net) until I got back home and looked it up.

    As for the origin of the game, I couldn't find much information about it. There's a wiki entry for it, but it doesn't tell much to establish it's history other than "A version of Twenty Questions is played as a parlor game by characters of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol." The earliest solid reference I can find is that it was a popular Saturday radio program on NBC in 1949, and "Animal, vegatable, or mineral" has always been the radio game's first question. Since C.S. Lewis wrote "Narnia" in 1950, I would have to guess he got the phrase from the game, and not the other way around. It later became a fledgeling ABC TV show (with host Bill Slater) during the 1950-51 season. However, I can't confirm whether or not the "A, V or M" phrase was used in the pre-radio parlor game days as well. I'm still looking for a comprehensive history of the game's origin.

     

  • At January 2, 2006 at 2:38 AM, Blogger Mr. Toast said…

    Update: Here's a reference claiming that the "A, V or M" phrase is "more than 100 years old", so I think we can say with some certainty that Lewis did not originate it.

    BTW, the apparent "intelligence" of the electronic version is easy to explain. If every answer must be "yes" or "no", then the possible number of objects to be classified are 2 to the 20th power, or about one million. With flash memory as small and cheap as it is today, building a device that holds a database of one million objects (plus the program instructions) is not difficult at all. Each question is designed to split the number of possible choices at least in half, so mathematically, the program should have no trouble selecting the right answer (or more accurately, elminating all the "wrong" answers) in 20 slices or less. The only time you'll win is if you don't answer the questions correctly, or if your item isn't in it's million-object database -- which is statistically unlikely.

    Fascinating!

     

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