Asking about linguistic characteristics of the word is cheating in twenty questions! :) There's a note about this at the end of the "How To" that's linked on the front page.

I'd rate this one "black diamond" level for sure.

::: spoiler My Questions is it alive? 👍

is it an animal? 👍

is it a land animal? 👎

is it a salt water fish? 👍

is it a tropical fish? 👍

is it commonly consumed in America? 👎

is it a common fish in home aquariums? 👎

is it a common fish in public aquariums? 👍

does it have a distinct color? 🤷‍♂️

is it larger than a bread box? 👎

is it a keystone species? 🤷‍♂️

is it a character in the movie Finding Nemo? 👍

Is it larger than one foot in length? 👎

does it have unique characteristics that differentiate it from other fish? 👍

is it a clown fish? 👎

is it an angler fish? 👎

is it a deep sea fish? 👎

is it a seahorse? ⭐ :::

Spoilers! :) I checked this one and it seems to have corrected itself. You're absolutely correct, though!

Thanks for finding this issue. Our "cheater buster" was a bit overzealous about the first question, but it's a legitimate non-cheating question so we've made an exception. It should work in the future. The second question was "no" probably because the word itself isn't in the plural form. The question "is there more than one of them in the world?" is functionally equivalent and works around this quirk.

Thanks for your feedback! We've implemented a change to improve the outcome of this kind of question in the future.

We've implemented a fix to make it more lenient. Sometimes the synonyms and spellings catch us off guard ("raccoon" vs "racoon"), but we should have known about this one! Sorry about that.

+CC @theparadox@lemmy.world

Server resets at 00:00 UTC. If you had the page open before that time and tried to ask a question, it refreshes the page so that the server isn't (unbeknownst to you) suddenly answering questions about a different word. We'll try to add something to handle that transition better in the future. Sorry about that!

Is it an animal / human? 👎

I think it didn't handle the "/" here very well. I've made a change to hopefully improve the outcome of that in the future.

LLMs tend to perform poorly with questions about linguistic characteristics of words. We have tuned responses to gently discourage questions like that. We also feel that they're kind of "cheating" at this sort of game. :)

Glad you enjoy it!