Fun with the Smart Engine

The Smart Engine tries to answer your multiple choice questions. Not sure how it works, but Cory Doctorow suspects it's doing searches in Google and comparing the sizes of the result sets.

I tried the following, starting with an easy one; who recorded "Abominog"

(a) Uriah Heep
(b) Led Zeppelin
(c) The Spice Girls
(d) Belgium

It got that one right, so I tried making it match up the following bloggers with their blogs

(a) Andrew Ian Dodge
(b) Dawn Olsen
(c) Scott M Baron
(d) Peter Mandleson

It correctly matched the first two, but seems to think that Scott is the MP for Hartlepool. (As far as I know, Mandy doesn't have a blog)

I asked it about Tony Blair - is he?

(a) Dubya's poodle
(b) An arrogant control freak
(c) Nothing but a cheesy grin
(d) Belgium

This clearly confused it, because it answered (d).

It's pretty clueless on trains - I gave it a list of these four first-generation British locomotive manufacturers:

(a) Brush
(b) English Electric
(c) Beyer-Peacock
(d) North British

It seems to think Class 47s, class 50s and Hymeks all came from North British. Which is clearly wrong, because all of them actually worked.

However, when asked about Virgin Train's new trains

(a) Voyagers
(b) Turbostars
(c) Pacers
(d) A load of rubbish

It correctly picked option (d)

Addendum: I realised there was no gaming one, so let's match Roleplaying games with monsters.

(a) Shoggoth
(b) Neo-Otyugh
(c) Broo
(d) Peter Mandelson

And this time, it got all four of them right - although "New Labour:The Spinning" has yet to be published :)