4 ms·

GeoGuessr is a lot of fun. I played it a lot a few years ago, but only recently discovered that there’s a community of very serious players, and got interested

by tobr 6y ago

GeoGuessr is a lot of fun. I played it a lot a few years ago, but only recently discovered that there’s a community of very serious players, and got interested in it again. For example check this video from yesterday where Tom Davies aka GeoWizard[1] gets a pretty good score on An Urban World: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TVt1GKBZMzc https://youtube.com/watch?v=TVt1GKBZMzc 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoWizard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoWizard

herbstein 6y ago
Tom Davis is very good at the game. I also recommend checking out his "straight line mission" videos. He tries crossing Wales (and more recently Norway) in a single straight line. Deviating by only a few feet across the trips. He manages to make it quite interesting to "just" watch a man walking in fields.
- herbstein 6y ago
  I thought a link was in order here. First video of his first "mission". Not everything he does is strictly legal, but it's never malicious. https://youtu.be/M7w986ni7_g https://youtu.be/M7w986ni7_g
sllabres 6y ago
The linked article https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-the-top-tips-tricks-and-techniques/ https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-... is interesting -- at least for me, a very casual player ;).
- lastofthemojito 6y ago
  I'm a fairly casual player too, and I guess I have my favorite aspects of the game - I've worked with foreign languages before so language identification is fun for me, and I'm a car enthusiast so I like informing guesses based on the cars I see. One thing this article raised that I'd never considered was the direction that satellite dishes face. Definitely going to keep my eye out for that!
schoen 6y ago
I got into GeoGuessr during the pandemic, and am still very into it! I can really recommend it as a way to learn about more of the world while you're stuck at home. Since I'm very interested in languages, I'm often surprised at how difficult other players sometimes find it to be to recognize specific languages (e.g. the differences between Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Italian are quite obvious to me, but often not to many other players). But I also notice that there are many, many world languages that I can't recognize easily; for Geogussr purposes in particular the most relevant for me right now are the Slavic languages (I can tell Polish apart from the others written in Latin script, but have trouble distinguishing the others that are written in that script; I have trouble distinguishing the Slavic languages that are written in Cyrillic; and I also have trouble distinguishing the Central Asian languages that are written in Cyrillic that are not from the Slavic family). Wikipedia has a great chart to help you recognize languages even without learning to speak or understand them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition... and I'm currently writing a language recognition trainer (which, when it's done, will give you a sample of text and ask you to guess what language it is, and, if you get it wrong, provide some kind of tips that could help you to recognize that language). I plan to make it available to the public when I'm finished. I'd love for the ability to recognize and distinguish languages from one another to become more widespread. Because of the ubiquity and importance of English, we native English speakers are said to be especially bad at this... not just at understanding other languages, but even at telling them apart!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dagw 6y ago
  Wikipedia has a great chart to help you recognize languages even without learning to speak or understand them: That would be awesome as an interactive flowchart
  - schoen 6y ago
    The article above links to https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-the-top-tips-tricks-and-techniques/ https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-... which (way in the middle of a huge amount of content) includes a couple of language recognition flowcharts -- diagrammatic rather than software-implemented. I doubt I would ever think of language recognition this way, but I bet those flowcharts do include individual tricks that people (like avid Geoguessr players) could choose to learn pretty easily. I mean, I guess a fact like "Łł is in Polish and no other national language" feels OK to me but I personally feel better about learning other kinds of features when at all possible (individual words, morphemes, n-grams?). Although I don't plan for my own trainer software to force users to learn any particular kind of tips rather than others; I'm hoping to have it generate several kinds of recognition tips that might appeal to different people. For example, I like knowing (and would like to teach people) that the English suffix -tion corresponds (regularly!) to * Latin -tio [accusative form "-tionem" often cited in etymology] * French -tion * Spanish -ción * Portuguese -ção * Catalan -ció * Italian -zione like: nation, natio, nation, nación, nação, nació, nazione But I could imagine that some people would say "I'm going to focus on how Portuguese and French have ç and these other languages don't, and Portuguese has ã and these other languages don't, and only Spanish and Catalan can have -ó, and Italian words almost always end with vowels and Catalan words commonly end with consonants" without learning the individual endings. And I hope I'll get my trainer into shape to help them learn that too, if they want to think about it that way.
nindalf 6y ago
I've only seen someone else play it but it's crazy how serious he was about it. Apart from the basic things like narrowing down based on languages in sign posts, he'd also use techniques like deriving latitude based on trees. This is gorgc on twitch, but I'm sure there are other streamers who play this game.

by tobr 6y ago

herbstein 6y ago

Tom Davis is very good at the game. I also recommend checking out his "straight line mission" videos. He tries crossing Wales (and more recently Norway) in a single straight line. Deviating by only a few feet across the trips. He manages to make it quite interesting to "just" watch a man walking in fields.

herbstein 6y ago
I thought a link was in order here. First video of his first "mission". Not everything he does is strictly legal, but it's never malicious. https://youtu.be/M7w986ni7_g https://youtu.be/M7w986ni7_g

sllabres 6y ago

The linked article https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-the-top-tips-tricks-and-techniques/ https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-... is interesting -- at least for me, a very casual player ;).

lastofthemojito 6y ago
I'm a fairly casual player too, and I guess I have my favorite aspects of the game - I've worked with foreign languages before so language identification is fun for me, and I'm a car enthusiast so I like informing guesses based on the cars I see. One thing this article raised that I'd never considered was the direction that satellite dishes face. Definitely going to keep my eye out for that!

schoen 6y ago

I got into GeoGuessr during the pandemic, and am still very into it! I can really recommend it as a way to learn about more of the world while you're stuck at home. Since I'm very interested in languages, I'm often surprised at how difficult other players sometimes find it to be to recognize specific languages (e.g. the differences between Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Italian are quite obvious to me, but often not to many other players). But I also notice that there are many, many world languages that I can't recognize easily; for Geogussr purposes in particular the most relevant for me right now are the Slavic languages (I can tell Polish apart from the others written in Latin script, but have trouble distinguishing the others that are written in that script; I have trouble distinguishing the Slavic languages that are written in Cyrillic; and I also have trouble distinguishing the Central Asian languages that are written in Cyrillic that are not from the Slavic family). Wikipedia has a great chart to help you recognize languages even without learning to speak or understand them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition... and I'm currently writing a language recognition trainer (which, when it's done, will give you a sample of text and ask you to guess what language it is, and, if you get it wrong, provide some kind of tips that could help you to recognize that language). I plan to make it available to the public when I'm finished. I'd love for the ability to recognize and distinguish languages from one another to become more widespread. Because of the ubiquity and importance of English, we native English speakers are said to be especially bad at this... not just at understanding other languages, but even at telling them apart!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dagw 6y ago
Wikipedia has a great chart to help you recognize languages even without learning to speak or understand them: That would be awesome as an interactive flowchart
- schoen 6y ago
  The article above links to https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-the-top-tips-tricks-and-techniques/ https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-... which (way in the middle of a huge amount of content) includes a couple of language recognition flowcharts -- diagrammatic rather than software-implemented. I doubt I would ever think of language recognition this way, but I bet those flowcharts do include individual tricks that people (like avid Geoguessr players) could choose to learn pretty easily. I mean, I guess a fact like "Łł is in Polish and no other national language" feels OK to me but I personally feel better about learning other kinds of features when at all possible (individual words, morphemes, n-grams?). Although I don't plan for my own trainer software to force users to learn any particular kind of tips rather than others; I'm hoping to have it generate several kinds of recognition tips that might appeal to different people. For example, I like knowing (and would like to teach people) that the English suffix -tion corresponds (regularly!) to * Latin -tio [accusative form "-tionem" often cited in etymology] * French -tion * Spanish -ción * Portuguese -ção * Catalan -ció * Italian -zione like: nation, natio, nation, nación, nação, nació, nazione But I could imagine that some people would say "I'm going to focus on how Portuguese and French have ç and these other languages don't, and Portuguese has ã and these other languages don't, and only Spanish and Catalan can have -ó, and Italian words almost always end with vowels and Catalan words commonly end with consonants" without learning the individual endings. And I hope I'll get my trainer into shape to help them learn that too, if they want to think about it that way.

nindalf 6y ago

I've only seen someone else play it but it's crazy how serious he was about it. Apart from the basic things like narrowing down based on languages in sign posts, he'd also use techniques like deriving latitude based on trees. This is gorgc on twitch, but I'm sure there are other streamers who play this game.