During a recent Hacker News comment thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952335), I used a "toy" machine learning model, designed to guess a person's age based on any fictional characters they can list in one sitting, to correctly predict the submitter's age. Later in the same thread, the same model guessed another user's age - 20 years too old! It got a lot of up vote activity, and it got me excited to revisit this side project.

I'm preparing to write up a post about the model, and would like to do some rewrites to improve its accuracy. I need your help!

Can you spend a few minutes -- take as much or as little time as you'd like -- to answer the first two questions on this form?

For the first one, just enter each name on its own line. Don't worry about spelling, and please enter each name in the "full name" form typical for the culture. In other words, even though the Bajoran first officer on Deep Space Nine's first name is "Nerys", it is presented as "Kira Nerys", and that's how it should be entered.

For the second question, please enter an integer for your current age. No decimals, fractions, ordinals or words like "early forties" - the model may use those words, but that's because it's "including the error bar", if you will, in its predictions.

If you want a one-time email letting you know when I've published a post (and Jupyter Notebook) for the model, you can provide your email address for the third question. Feel free to use an anonymous email provider if you'd like, and set it to allow only one email; I really will just send one message when the post is live.

I'll take your data, minus your email address (if provided), and use it to train an updated model to predict a person's age based on the fictional characters that they remember most. Or, the names alone will be used for validation, with the age supplied used to check the model's answer to see how accurate it is.

Thanks so much for any time you choose to spend on this, even if you're leaving right now to go do something else. I'd love any tweets/social network postings as well, if you feel like sharing. Thanks again!

Let's get started...

Oh, and... please be a good sport about this! "Your mom" is probably not a character in a book you read, and I'm pretty sure you're not 999 years old. 😀