Everybody Votes

[Tony Lama]

Does anyone take the time to play the EVRYBODY VOTES channel on their Wii consoles? It's weird, but whenever I turn on my Wii I have to check it out and participate before I play a real game. Anyway, I just wanted to compare scores with everyone else. Here are my stats as of September 16, 2008 at 2:02pm CST:

VOTE COUNT: 122
PREDICTION RECORD: Wins-81 , Losses-37
PREDICTION ACCURACY: 68.6%

[MachineGex]

It's weird, but whenever I turn on my Wii I have to check it out and participate before I play a real game...

Yeah, I am the same way...
Vote Count: 135
Wins: 97
Losses: 35
Prediction Accuracy: 73.4%

btw...what does the "Distance From Popular Opinion" mean? I am 240m and my wife is 76m, I have no idea what that means.

[ice1605]

Yeah, I am the same way...
Vote Count: 135
Wins: 97
Losses: 35
Prediction Accuracy: 73.4%

btw...what does the "Distance From Popular Opinion" mean? I am 240m and my wife is 76m, I have no idea what that means.

It is basically a way to tell you how many times your preference is different from the one that most people pick (although I don't know how the distances themselves are calculated, sorry).

[Dangerboy]

I used to check it all the time, until I moved the channel off to make room for some downloads.

Never put it back.

[otaku]

when I had one I always tried to vote I no longer have a wii though

[Sabz5150]

I blogged about EV a while back on my little bitty blog that nobody reads...

Hereya go :)

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Everybody Votes: Wiis, damned Wiis, and statistics.

What is a cheesecake? A cake or a pie?

Hell, I thought it was a cake. Apparently so does most of America. Sadly though, it is a pie. Yes, Virginia… the cake is most certainly a lie.

I’m not sure if Shiggy and his guys n gals at Nintendo realize it (and I am sure they do), but Nintendo is sitting on an extremely powerful tool. How so? I shall explain.

http://www.brightminds.co.uk/products/images/large/B8418.jpg

Everyone should know what this is. It’s a pocket 20Q toy. The idea is simple… think of something, answer 20 questions based upon that something and it guesses. Extremely accurate too, might I add. It guessed uranium, dinosaur, a star, and many other things simply based on the answers to what seem like very odd questions.

“Does it bring joy to others?” Well I guess uranium does… a greenish glow would definitely get the ladies’ attention.

Anyway, the 20Q toy is only a small piece of a huge artificial intelligence neural net that has been learning for decades now. The more it learns, the more distinctions it can make, and the more accurate it’s “guesses” become, which is also neat to watch when it really tries to guess, when it doesn’t know what you’re thinking.

The real neat part is how it learns. 20Q has been designed to be a game. It makes teaching an artificial intelligence fun. Go to www.20q.com and check it out. Obviously if you can make something fun, no matter what it is, you get more results. People don’t realize that while they’re having laughs with their coworkers, they’re actually doing the work of advancing this AI.

So what’s this got to do with Everybody Votes? Everything.

Everybody Votes is to statistics as 20Q is to AI. It has the ability to gather rather accurate statistics (much higher than your average Gallup poll), and does in a format that is fun for the audience. Sure, nobody needs stats on what America thinks of a cheesecake, but the other polls, mainly the worldwide ones, carry some more significance. ‘Do you have siblings?’, ‘Orthodox or Southpaw?’, ‘Do you own a mobile phone?’, ‘Do you own pets?’, ‘What format is your TV?’, things like that can be extremely useful, and the audience is happy to participate. They cast their vote and are allowed to predict the results. How neat! Gathering information on a huge chunk of population has never been easier, or fun!

Nintendo themselves could be using some of this info. No doubt knowing TV formats, number of potential players in a household and what their dominant hand is goes a long way to telling Shiggy how to aim his N-shaped crosshairs.

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Does anyone agree with this?

[Tony Lama]

Thank you for sharing your blog entry on EVERYBODY VOTES! Very interesting and insightful! I never thought about it, but Nintendo is prepping their next system by letteng their current one gather the data!

[Sabz5150]

Glad to provide a "hmmmmmmmmm..." factor.

Info like that is really useful when producing games, especially since games are getting more interactive (i.e. the Wii)

An excellent example of this is that, unlike most of us over here in the States...

http://www.kasuto.net/image/officialart/link3.jpg

Link is a southpaw.

[Nature Boy]

Info like that is really useful when producing games, especially since games are getting more interactive (i.e. the Wii)

I don't think the interactivity has any bearing to the point personally. But I agree.

MS I know for sure looks at the stats of who downloads a demo vs who buys the product. I'd assume Nintendo and Sony do the same. That's gotta be *huge* for the industry, learning how people react to product.

[Icarus Moonsight]

I love those 20Q things. Everyone Votes? Not so much. It was neat for a while, but it got boring and I would rather be playing a game anyways.