[zipppy]

What? My point is that I drew the same doodle for different words, and for each word it put forth a different _first_ guess.

The first guess for each doodle was the word that was provided -- if this software was completely legitimate, I would think it should have guessed the same word for each (and then moved on to other guesses).

[simias]

They weren't really the same though, right? Only similar.

A good test for that would be to script the game and give it pixel-identical answers for each questions and see if the result is different.

[zipppy]

Correct that they were not identical, but they were quite close; five lines that looked like a 'w'.

[mthoms]

I wonder if the zig-zag drawing and the stairs were actually as similar as you remember.

For instance, our sub-conscious tendency when drawing stairs would be to have straight lines at 0 and 90 degrees but a "zig-zag" wouldn't necessarily have that feature. Thus, even though you thought the drawings were the same, there were sufficient detectable differences for the AI to recognize.