Seriously I’ve seen a guy see a bunch of pixels and go “Idk but that reminds me of Mexico” and he was right. There’s no way the three letter companies wouldn’t want that kind of skillset, right?

  • SGforce@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Really it’s crowdsourcing and statistics. Show an image to a big enough crowd and someone will pick something up. It’s like the birthday problem but with geography.

          • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
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            1 month ago

            Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but skill level does not really factor in as to whether something is crowdsourced. Are you just referring to the geoguessr website/game?

    • Trailblazing Braille Taser@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 month ago

      Not to pile on here, but this is not an instance of the birthday problem.

      The birthday problem would kick in if we asked “what are the chances that any two of these N people know the same place, whatever it may be.”

      But instead we’re discussing “what are the chances that one of these N people recognizes a specific place P.”

      Edit: maybe I’ve missed your point actually — were you saying that there are many details in one image, and the chances of some player recognizing one of those details is an instance of the birthday problem?

      • Deestan@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        there are many details in one image, and the chances of some player recognizing one of those details is an instance of the birthday problem?

        That would be a valid model. But you are still right that it doesn’t apply: It would give the effect that a different geoguesser would get the picture right every test, while we are seeing consistent results from the top geoguessers.

    • Deestan@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I see your point, but the Birthday Problem would apply differently.

      It is the chance of “collision” between randomly picked elements from two large enough sets of comparable random data. If I understand correctly, the random data here would be “geographical fact” like bush density and road width. Set A is geoguessers’ geographical knowledge, and set B is pictures’ geographical features.

      So if we picked hundreds of random picture and hundreds of geoguessers and asked them, the chance of one guessing one image is high. And the person would be largely dfferent every time.

      In this case, we can give one specific geoguesser a large amount of pictures and that same geoguesser would get most of them right.