Why do we love Akinator? The company behind the celeb-guessing genie explains its “divinatory art.”

I don’t remember who I thought of the first time I encountered Akinator. I only remember that the guessing game felt like a magic trick.

It would have been around 2009, two years after French company Elokence first launched its sleuthing genie. My friends and I huddled around my computer while thinking of movie stars, obscure basketball players, and fictional characters. No matter who we thought of, Akinator solved the puzzle more times than not. The predictive program was able to read our minds with fewer guesses than what seemed possible.

Early reviews of Akinator show that I was not alone in my assessment. Outlets described the program as magic, wondrous, and a timekiller.

Akinator search volume dipped in the early 2010s, but then a funny thing happened: Creators discovered Elokence’s genie and fell in love with it. Over the past decade, there has been a steady stream of Akinator videos uploaded to YouTube. Markiplier played the guessing game in 2015, AliA “beat” it in 2022, and Foltyn gave it a try a couple of months ago. The advent of YouTube Shorts has led to brief Akinator clips from creators like CaseOh, NotLeah, and Sambucha. At the time of this post, multiple Akinator videos with thousands of views have been uploaded within the past three days.

Jérôme Soreau, the Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer at Elokence, told Tubefilter that word of mouth has been a potent marketing tool for Akinator. “Players,” Soreau said, “are our main ambassadors. And, of course, this effect is augmented when some influencers talk about Akinator.”

Viral marketing has helped Akinator stay relevant, but it doesn’t explain why the program is still popular in an era that offers far more powerful predictive tools. Generative AI should have made Akinator obsolete, but it hasn’t. Why?

To answer that question, we have to dive into the algorithm that dictates Akinator’s behavior. Acording to the “fabulous story of Akinator,” a subsection of the program’s website, Elokence founder Arnaud Mégret encountered Akinator after rubbing an oil lamp in “the far away lands of the East.”

The actual story is less fanciful, but more interesting from a technical standpoint. Soreau explained the Mégret created the first Akinator algorithm after drawing inspiration from his family life. “His starting idea was to create a guessing game based on a common game that French parents played with their kids,” Soreau said.

Mégret began with a French database before expanding globally. The genie was originally called Devinettor before changing his name “to be more international,” Soreau said.

A Medium post published last September identified four “key components” that serve as the building blocks of Akinator’s “algorithmic magic”: binary search, decision trees, machine learning, and collaborative filtering. Through deductive reasoning, Akinator is able to whittle millions of potential answers into a much smaller subset of educated guesses.

Elokence’s R&D team continues to refine Akinator with help from the data collected from player guesses. (That data isn’t used for external purposes outside of Elokence, Soreau said). The result is an alogirthm with “huge guessing power,” allowing the genie to continue impressing players with his accuracy.

Soreau said that the refined nature of the Akinator alogrithm keeps the program relevant amid an AI boom. “We think that Generative AI is really good for general tasks, but these tasks are particularly power-intensive consuming and therefore very expensive, while the divinatory art of Akinator is very power-low consuming thanks to the efficiency of our proprietary technology,” he told Tubefilter.

So even as AI-generated content becomes more common and lifelike, creators will continue to flock to a 2D genie with a deep knowledge of the YouTube community. The game’s simplicity is arguably the key to its staying power. As long as there are celebrity creators, there can be celebrity creators trying to get Akinator to guess them.

That video topic has become a genre so vast that, when I asked Soreau to name his favorite Akinator video, he demured. “There are many videos featuring Akinator, in several languages and countries,” he said. “So how to select only one?”