Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/23/very-fun-algorithm-guesses-you.html
…
1 Like
This wasn’t terribly accurate for me, but it was interesting seeing the name popularity change by dragging the decade slider.
7 Likes
5 Likes
Apparently I must be a spelling mistake, as it didn’t suggest my name, even after I typed my whole name in. On a point of order, I don’t think that this thing “guesses” at all.
4 Likes
My name was in the list but it didn’t guess correctly until I typed in the whole thing.
2 Likes
My wife and I are trans, and have some weird names to begin with before transitioning. We had to fiddle with the gender for each of us, but still, I was surprised it got both our middle names at all. Not our first names though, pre and post transition we were just weird.
6 Likes
Gave up on the third letter. Curiously, it’s a slightly famous (you’ve heard of it) name from Western literature that has somehow never caught on.
8 Likes
damn, i felt sure it wouldn’t, but it nailed me on the first letter.
4 Likes
I was absolutely shocked it did not get my name.
5 Likes
Not so much a name guessing algorithm, as it is a basic statistics lookup?
7 Likes
If you go to a website that has a text box for you to enter a letter, and then it tells you what letter you entered, even that would be an algorithm. I wouldn’t be too surprised if a website where you entered an input and then it did “nothing” was formally an algorithm under the most common definitions, which may not specify that the operations or the output have to be non-empty. But definitely, “Just guess Michael” is a name guessing algorithm.
4 Likes
Should we call youm, “Ishmael”?
5 Likes
same here
1 Like
Considering the data is from a different country to me it was disturbingly accurate about my kids’ first and middle names. -1 for originality to me and my wife.
1 Like
Worked brilliantly for me, both of my parents, and two of my three siblings.
An interesting data search algorithm that correlates gender, decade of birth, and first few letters of the first name. The “intelligence” in it is just identifying a clear statistical favorite when one emerges.
Some of them are drop-dead simple, of course. I was one of four boys in my third grade class (ca. 30 students) who shared the same given name.
For me this is a bit of a caution about how very few data points it takes to start getting the necessary level of detail to accomplish an identity theft.
4 Likes
I have a very common name so i’m sure even a human being could guess what my name is with just the first letter 
Crashed and burned with “Hamish”… Incomplete algorithm is incomplete.
My parents always said they picked the names they did for my sister and me because they weren’t in the family, our clan having many repeats, e.g., Robert, Richard, William. They did, however, manage to pick two names that were really high on the popularity list for the time we were born. I only had to enter the first letter for mine. For my sister, and coincidentally also for my SO, just the decade was enough.
You mean it works really well for white people.
5 Likes
White US American people.
4 Likes
