Kevin Kelly of the Cool Tools website wrote a review of the 20 Questions Handheld Game from Radica that's definitely worth checking out. He says this is a slightly scaled-down version of the 20q.net website, which is a neural network designed to play a game of 20 questions against a visitor to the site.

According to the review:

Last year, after 1 million rounds of 20 questions online, the neural net had accumulated 10 million synaptic associations. It has a 73% success rate of guessing what you thought. Burgener then compressed the 20Q code to run on a chip, and had the neural net select 2,000 of the most popular 10,000 objects it then knew about. He then had the neural net select out the most useful 250,000 synaptic connections related to those 2,000 objects, and hard wired that learning into the chip in the orb.

This is neat. I'm going to have to get one and see how different it is from the 20Q website. I'm sure it will be interesting to have in the living room during a party.