The author stumbled upon an old programming book and found a self-learning game called “Guess the Animal” written in BASIC in the 1980s. The game used a decision tree to ask questions and learn from user responses, adding new animals and questions to its knowledge base. The author recreated the game in C++ to showcase how a simple children’s game from the past anticipated the era of machine learning. By implementing the game in modern programming language, the author demonstrated how simple ideas like decision trees and self-learning algorithms have paved the way for modern AI technologies. Both versions of the game highlight the importance of the idea and algorithm over the complexity of the tool used.
https://medium.com/@alexey.medvecky/ai-in-the-80s-how-a-simple-animal-guessing-game-pioneered-machine-learning-before-it-was-cool-2f4a63dfe762