Final Project: The Final Idea
We decided to remove the aspect of real-time, in a sense. Although we liked the idea of having a human answer/ask a question followed up with a machine answer, there were simply too many problems associated with that idea to make us comfortable. We decided to make a website that would allow users to answer and ask a question. It can be found at http://querying.me/ . The website was simply enough to build and it was finished about 2 weeks before the show so that gave us more than enough time to send the site out to the network of friends on facebook and twitter to bring in a bunch of people. Just like in our original project, the idea of asking and answering a question was present. On the website, users would see a question at the top of the page and they would be given the chance to answer. When they typed in the answer and hit enter or the submit button, a new question would display, and they could answer that question if they so wished as well. Of course they could refresh the page if they did not like the question. The questions were coming from a database. Users could “ask” a question if they felt like it. Those questions they ask would be fed into the database and would randomly appear in the “answer” section of the website. By the end of the two week period we had a total of 290 questions with 1950 answers. This was way more than we would have gotten at the show, so this idea worked out perfectly.
In our own time before the show, our group went to answers.com and fed in questions that people had asked. We took the first line of the answer and made that a choice. If answers.com did not have an answer, we would write in “Does not compute.” We always made “a” the human answer and “b” the machine answer.
