About
VayLoLo is the digital version of the game "I'm thinking of something — guess what!" You think, it asks — and most of the time, it gets it right. But how?
Not Magic — Mathematics
There is no talking AI behind VayLoLo. The heart of the game is a large knowledge matrix holding the answers of thousands of objects to hundreds of questions: "Is a cat alive?" → Yes. "Does a cat run on electricity?" → No. "Does a cat live indoors?" → Sometimes.
In every round, the game runs the same calculation: Which question splits the remaining candidates most evenly in two? In information theory this is called information gain. A good question halves the number of candidates no matter what the answer is. With 20 questions, you can theoretically pick one object out of 220 — more than a million. That is exactly VayLoLo's "intelligence": choosing the mathematically most efficient question in every round.
A Game That Learns As You Play
The knowledge matrix isn't static — it evolves with every game, like a living organism:
- When VayLoLo guesses correctly, your answers fine-tune the object's data.
- When it guesses wrong and you reveal the real object, that object's data gets strongly updated.
- If you thought of a completely unknown object, your suggestion is reviewed and added to the game — making it a little richer for the next player.
So everyone who beats VayLoLo actually makes it a bit stronger. What it can't guess today, it will know tomorrow.
A Short History of 20 Questions
Twenty questions is a classic parlour game played since the 19th century. In the US, the radio show Twenty Questions brought it to a mass audience in the 1940s; in Germany it has been played for generations as "20 Fragen", and countless local variants exist around the world. The essence is always the same: narrowing down a huge space of possibilities with just a few yes/no questions.
Here's the fascinating part: this parlour game maps exactly onto one of the core concepts of modern computer science — binary search and entropy. Claude Shannon's information theory, founded in 1948, lets us measure "how much information a question carries". VayLoLo brings a 200-year-old parlour game together with a 75-year-old mathematical theory.
Our Approach to Privacy
VayLoLo has no user accounts and collects no personal data. Game results are stored anonymously and used solely to improve the game itself. See our privacy policy for details.