A dad made a real-life 'Harry Potter' sorting hat using IBM's Watson -- here's how it works

Ryan Anderson, a solutions architect for IBM Watson, took his work home with him when he decided to make a functional'Harry Potter' sorting hat for his two daughters: Lucy, 8, and Julia, 6. "I was thinking of fun projects and, coincidentally, I have a couple daughters and they are mad keen on'Harry Potter' - they've read the books like 5 times," he told Tech Insider. The hat works simply enough. You place it on your head (that part is actually for fun, you could just talk to it) and tell the sorting hat a few things about yourself so it can sort you appropriately. The sorting hat runs on Watson's Natural Language Classifier, which interprets the intent behind a set of text. So since Anderson coded that'honesty' is a characteristic of Hufflepuff, the hat will dub you a badger if you describe yourself as honest or use similar words to do so.