IBM Engineer Builds a Harry Potter Sorting Hat Using 'Watson' AI (thenextweb.com)

An anonymous reader writes: As America celebrates Father's Day, The Next Web reports on an IBM engineer who found a way to combine his daughters' interest in the Harry Potter series with an educational home technology project. Together they built a Hogwarts-style sorting hat -- which assigns its wearer into an appropriate residence house at the school of magic -- and it does it using IBM's cognitive computing platform Watson. "The hat uses Watson's Natural Language Classifier and Speech to Text to let the wearer simply talk to the hat, then be sorted according to what he or she says..." reports The Next Web. "Anderson coded the hat to pick up on words that fit the characteristics of each Hogwarts house, with brainy and cleverness going right into Ravenclaw's territory and honesty a recognized Hufflepuff attribute."
The hat's algorithm would place Stephen Hawking and Hillary Clinton into Ravenclaw, according to the article, while Donald Trump "was assigned to Gryffindor for his boldness -- but only with a 48 percent certainty."

The sorting hat talks, drawing its data directly from the IBM Cloud, and if you're interested in building your own, the IBM engineer has shared a tutorial online.

Comments

Not Slytherin eh?

[monkeyman.kix]

Donald Trump "was assigned to Gryffindor for his boldness -- but only with a 48 percent certainty."

Sorting Hat: Not Slytherin, eh? Are you sure? You could be great, you know. It's all here in your head. And Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness, there's no doubt about that. No?

Trump: Please, please. Anything but Slytherin, anything but Slytherin.

Sorting Hat: Well if you're sure, better be... GRYFFINDOR!

Re:Not Slytherin eh?

[Lennie]

Of course it's hard to place Donald Trump in one of the buckets. He has no opinion. It's one now, an other the day after and other the day after that.

For Donald Trump winning is more important that anything else, not truth or making clear what his plans are for the country. And some people like what is perceived a strong leader. He's just a bullshitter.

Better title

[93 Escort Wagon]

IBM engineer attempts to suck all the joy out of yet another thing his daughter used to take pleasure from.

Re:Never Mind

[jandersen]

He's an IBM engineer. He'll be let go in the next restructuring initiative.

Oh, brighten up ever so slightly. It's a bit of innocent sillyness; the company probably thought there was a chance for them to appear more likeable. It is at most shrugworthy. Haven't you ever used a tool for something that could be considered massive overkill? I certainly do on a regular basis - I play with developing programs for organising things in the home, like a database of all the letters and other documents I receive. On the backend I use Oracle Enterprise Edition, because it is available to download for free. The actual code is a Java web application running on a Glassfish application server. Massive overkill by any standard, but why not? I'm not planning on selling it, but it is useful to be able to use these tools, and playing around with them prepares you for working professionally with them.