AI in the 80s: A Simple Animal Guessing Game That Pioneered Machine Learning

This article recounts a simple game, "Guess the Animal," written in BASIC in the 1980s. Using a decision tree, the game asks yes/no questions to guess the animal. Crucially, it learns from mistakes, adding new questions and answers to its knowledge base and saving/loading progress. This showcases early explorations of trainable algorithms, predating modern AI hype. The author recreated the algorithm in C++, comparing the advantages and disadvantages of both implementations. The article highlights how even simple ideas, like decision trees and self-learning, anticipated modern AI.