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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3063 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 23, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've been seeing some of this geoguessr guys (georainbolt) videos for a while now, but this one just seems too absurd to believe.

https://twitter.com/georainbolt/status/1667908968163987457?s=20

From a 0.1 second flash of a location he is able to tell where it is in the world? Is anyone suspicious of this at all, I know this is his thing and he streams it, but it seems genuinely impossible. I feel like it's more likely that he's doing some kind of trickery with the software (ie prerecording the puzzles and memorizing the pattern beforehand) than he can guess where he is in the world with this kind of consistency. Though his whole twitter page is sending people locations of their old family photos which seems so many levels of fakery...maybe a combination of both? or maybe the human brain is just that good...or maybe GeoGuessr has other clues or tricks (only certain cities in some countries)...This does seem crazy impressive if legit.

I believe it. Watch this video to get an idea of what he's doing https://youtube.com/watch?v=509wv0cohgA

I saw one where he got it to the correct road and section of the road since it was by almost the only lake in Lesotho, so that one was a good bit more understandable to me than this one.

It's probably real, but luck. He just does this constantly, right? If he does this for an hour a day every day for two years, and each round takes a minute, that's 40k rounds, and one in 40k seems like enough room for luck if he's already a bit accurate. And if he was this accurate with any consistency, he wouldn't have acted so shocked about it!

And you can get a lot of detail from a .1 second flash of an image. Some internet video memes flash various images by at ten per second, and if you pay attention you can get a lot of detail. Various studies find that even with <100ms people can still identify things. And that'd only improve if you practiced a lot, so I could see him narrowing it down to a general region from that, and then getting lucky.

no clear tells

I think if you're smart and you look at a hundred different (location, image) pairs, you'd pick up on a lot of associations between "how things look" and the location. Types of plants, style of buildings/roads, etc. If you've only seen a few hundred pairs signage style might be your only option.

His explanation was that it “looked like the Ghana East Road”. How many times, even if he’s done tens of thousands of geoguessr puzzles, has he encountered the Ghana East Road?

I think if it is real it is, as a user below suggested, a combination of immediate inside baseball tells (like reflections, smudges, weird quirks that longstanding players know suggest a particular country or region or vehicle or time) and general appearance. So maybe you’ve come to recognise tells that mean it’s Ghana, and streetview in Ghana is limited to a small portion of the road network, and you remember some loose visual features, and then you make a very lucky guess.

That’s possible, although still in my opinion the less likely scenario. But people can solve Rubik’s cubes in a couple of seconds, once you can memorize and act on a huge library of tells you can do impressive things.

This is definitely real, and very, very lucky. The primary method of guessing (he's been playing this 0.1 second thing for a while now) is via meta/vibes based stuff, including colour, car tells, photo artifacts etc. The country is easily West African from the 0.1 second snippet, top level players can probably know that it is likely to be Ghana (only some countries are included, Ghana being one of them) based on Meta like this: https://i.redd.it/2ofuurlj61g61.png. (Out of date now, but you get the idea). And then you have a relatively small subset of main roads to choose from. He just got very lucky this time. Even if because of his advanced skills he has a 1 in 1000 chance of guessing the correct road, he must play at least that many games a month.

The country is easily West African from the 0.1 second snippet, top level players can probably know that it is likely to be Ghana (only some countries are included, Ghana being one of them) based on Meta like this: https://i.redd.it/2ofuurlj61g61.png.

Yeah, so it turns out that Ghana is one of the easiest countries to guess because there's a clear tell that it was the Ghanaian streetview vehicle. Then the number of covered roads in the country is small, so the guess seems reasonable. I withdraw my earlier objection.

I was about to edit in something about chicken sexing lol.

I don't think the system 1/system 2 or conscious/unconscious distinction is meaningful tbh, both are the same kind of learning and knowledge mechanically (and smart people are better at 'both').

Edit: I think because there are specific meta tells for Ghana, it could be real. My bad.

GeoGuessr has other clues or tricks

The subreddit in its wiki links to an old thread with heplful hints, which aren't even google street view specific. Like how trafic signs look in different countries. Higher tier probably involves looking at GST in particular, like how the reflected google car looks like, resolution or camera attributes. Maybe the Renault Twingo was used only in Mongolia, or a moon shaped smudge on the top-right was only on the lens when Chile photographed, etc.

I don't believe it. Must be some kind of a trick. You can't gather enough information from a 0.1 second exposure. So either he knows in advance what it is, or he's using some kind of side channel - e.g. the pictures aren't random or there's some other clue. Magicians have dozens upon dozens of tricks like that, so I would guess he's using one of them, or came up with his own.

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