Friday, November 21, 2008

Image Game

Todd and I have been in a creative competition. We pick a topic and than create something with the topic as our... ...topic. Our most recent topic is "star". As I was brainstorming an idea, I thought about how searching on Google Image Search for "star" brings up a lot of pictures of stars. That gave me an idea for a game that had nothing to do with stars and everything to do with Google Image Search. I produced this Image Game. Let me know if it's fun, whether it could use some improvement, or anything else that occurs to you as you play it.

4 comments:

  1. Clever idea. I like it. You misspelled "circuit board" though, so I failed on it even though I had the correct answer.

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  2. Thanks; glad you like it.

    The dictionary of terms is automated: it feeds off of other players' incorrect guesses to introduce new terms. That's why I made the "Painful" level - this is where the new terms first appear, including misspellings, and anything else that gets typed in. If the new term is guessed easily it will begin showing up in the other three levels. If it appears 5 separate times in the "Painful" section without a correct guess, it's discarded. The misspelling for "circuit board" will likely not show up in the future, or at least not after 4 other people cannot guess it due to it being misspelled.

    This also means that if you were playing a different level and got this bad entry, someone else guessed it "correctly" by typing the misspelled version. The automated method isn't perfect.

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  3. Hi, I liked the Image Game very much, but I have a few problems with it. Some of them came from the fact that I am not a native English speaker, but some of them certainly could not be due to my lack of vocabulary.

    For example, the game showed me the image of something that seemed like a paper with legal content, so I wrote "contract". But it was not. Next, came an image very similar to the previous, so I tried "lawsuit". Again, was not. I gave up and kept on hitting Enter and next came an image of planet earth upon a pair of hands, a meeting room and something that looked like an auditorium. I looked at the answer, and it was... "pencil". (btw, I am playing on easy).

    I searched Google Image with the word "pencil", just to check if the first entries were that awkward, and it turned out they were not. Uhm, so what I am trying to say is that, given that I was playing in easy, I thought that the first results from Google would be displayed, but instead the game returned me with some strange images, barely connected to the word. So I wonder why this happened.

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  4. That's very odd. Your thinking is correct: it's set up to search Google using the hidden search term and then return the first 5 results. I tried it just now and it seems to be working in that fashion for me. I'm honestly not sure why it's giving you such bizarre results; I'll look into the Google Search API and see if anyone else has run across this issue.

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