X's   Opinion

Networked installation
On the Road, Floating project, Hong Kong, 2016
| Online version |

X's Opinion is a website that automatically answers popular questions fetched from the Internet in a generative way. It grabs questions from Quara and answers each question by specific calculation that is associated with Logistic Map. The answers seem to be random at the first glance, but they are actually predetermined by the equation as well as the content of each question. It creates an imaginative persona made from an array of answers, towards the questions people raising nowadays. It is very much possible that there is someone in the world who will answer all these questions in the exact same way.

It is also a "fake" decision making process that triggers reflection on how we make our own decisions and how we perceive others decision.The feature of chaos theory that it is high sensitive towards initial condition, is very much similar to the high dependency on personality/previous experience(the initial self when facing the questions) of our decision making process.


X's Opinion 是一個自動回答問題的網站。它會先從問答網站Quora上獲取一些人們提出的問題然後通過計算,對照混沌現象中的典型範例——單峰映象生成Yes或者No的回答。乍看之下,這些答案似乎是隨機生成的。但實際上,他們是由每一個問題的內容和當時所使用的公式所預先決定的。

通過一系列Yes與No的回答,X's Opinion借此創造了一個虛擬的、想像的人格。在這個世界的某一個角落,很可能也存在這樣一個會對所有問題抱以同樣回答的人。

與此同時 X's Opinion 還是一個虛假的決策過程,意圖引發我們對自身決策過程同我們如何感知他人決策的反思。 混沌理論的一大特點便是對初始條件的高度靈敏,而這與我們自身決策過程中性格與經驗起到的決定性作用不謀而合。

Technical Details

The Questions gathering process from Quora is done in JAVA with the help of jsoup.
>> source code

1.With each refresh of the webpage, the program will generate a new parameter and an initial value(x0) as the Mr.X to answer the questions later.
2.Then it generate a logistic map from the equation and visualize it in the background.
3.For each randomly picked question from Quora, it analyses the alphabets as well as the length of words from it, in order to calculate a corresponding value.
4.At last, it takes this value and refers back to the logistic map to decide the final answer of the question.

The Save as pdf function is achieved with the help of jsPDF.
(Copyright (c) 2010-2014 James Hall)

CHEN Qianxun | 2016 | X's Opinion