inauspicio.us

Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
I don’t even know.

Building a little bit on the fascinatingness of the maze-running program below, I decided to take another of my old projects and update it. This program will run on Windows XP and newer computers and it is totally awesome. It’s called CrunchTime, and it is a predictive classifier that builds decision trees.

Now even if you don’t have any familiarity with artificial intelligence, you probably know what decision trees are. Similar to flowcharts, they start at the top with a question. For example, “Will the toaster break today?” The goal of the decision tree is to predict the answer to this question. So it doesn’t know directly whether the toaster will break today or not, but it might have access to some ancillary data. For instance, it might know whether the toaster broke yesterday, whether the toaster has been submerged recently, or what color the ceiling tile is.

The algorithm inside CrunchTime goes through all of the example data you give it and decides which of these questions is most important. That is, it determines which series of questions, in which order, are the most effective at predicting the answer to the question you care about (“Will the toaster break today?” Inquiring minds want to know!)

The program is awesome and the download is free. Get a copy and try it out, eh?