Wizard's Blog

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Hunch is a new website (still in alpha) that helps you make decisions.

For example if you wanted to rent a movie and didn't know which one to watch, Hunch would ask you a series of questions and give you a recommendation based on your answers.

Where Hunch gets really clever is that it learns about you based on your answers and gets more and more accurate as you use it.

An interesting thing they can do with Hunch is take a look at larger trends based on the answers of all Hunch users.  For example according to the Hunch blog, people who answered "Yes" to the question "Have you ever broken an arm or a leg?" were more likely to prefer games like Madden NFL 09, and people who answered "No" were more likely to prefer games like Super Mario Galaxy.

As the accuracy of Hunch's predictions relies not only on your answers but on its knowledge of everyone's answers, it's not as smart now as it will be in the future.  For example if Hunch has no idea what to recommend you but other people who gave similar answers to you chose a particular answer, that will give Hunch an idea of what to suggest to you.

A question that some people are asking is how Hunch will make money.  One idea is for companies pay to be included in the recommendations Hunch makes.  How the recommendations would maintain their accuracy while at the same time being sold is another question.

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