Geo Guesser

[LongBlade]

This is interesting. It's a game about trying to place where on a map a picture was taken.

It comes from an article about how Google has created a program to do this automatically.

I got 8053 points on my first time.

https://www.geoguessr.com/world/play

Article on Google:

Nevertheless, humans are surprisingly good at this task. To help, they bring to bear all kinds of knowledge about the world such as the type and language of signs on display, the types of vegetation, architectural styles, the direction of traffic, and so on. Humans spend a lifetime picking up these kinds of geolocation cues.

So it's easy to think that machines would struggle with this task. And indeed, they have.

Today, that changes thanks to the work of Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals. These guys have trained a deep-learning machine to work out the location of almost any photo using only the pixels it contains.

Their new machine significantly outperforms humans and can even use a clever trick to determine the location of indoor images and pictures of specific things such as pets, food, and so on that have no location cues.

source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600889/google-unveils-neural-network-with-superhuman-ability-to-determine-the-location-of-almost/

[BanzaiCat]

Pretty cool find, LB.

12,286. Though I got lucky - was dropped in the middle of nowhere on a 2-lane road, so kept clicking and by the 10th click a delivery truck was going the opposite way with Cyrillic writing on the side and a ".ru" website. I was lucky in that I managed to click within 1,000 km of the locale.

[LongBlade]

I didn't click on any pics until my second go round. Got 14208 that time. I knew I was looking at Chile, but the spelling on a road sign gave the the impression of Portuguese so I went with Brazil.

OTOH I nailed two spots in Switzerland and California by about 50 miles. That felt awesome.

[Airborne Rifles]

I've been using this in the classroom since last semester. The students really get into it.

[LongBlade]

I've gotten pretty good. 21832  8)