Slashdot Mirror
LGP Announces New Competition
Time Doctor writes "Linux Game Publishing announced its new game competition today, wherein an image relating to the game is revealed one pixel a second and competitors can attempt to be the first to guess it. Winner gets the first copy of the game, and the unofficial award of having way too much time on their hands to sit around waiting for pixels to change."
Why can't I see the sailboat?
Face it, do something enough times, and it can cause problems.
They allow guessing but not wild guessing. How silly!
With innovative ideas and advanced gameplay like this, it is only a matter of time until Linux dominates not just the desktop market, but the gaming market as well.
See, there are sweet games for Linux. Geez, I don't know what everybody's always bitching about.
Wah wah, I can't play Halo! So what? Shut up and go play "Guess the Game".
What's going to be good is that the image is going to be a screenshot of this very webpage. That's right folks, the answer to Guess the Game is: Guess the Picture! The newest sensation in an already exciting catalog of Linux games!
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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they are putting a dynamically generated 1085x814 image that changes once a second on to a site where we here at slashdot are going to check it out repeatedly? That doesn't appear to be a very bright idea.
boring news is better then no news... erm wait no it isnt
The world's smartest bug zapper www.zapstats.com/kickstarter
Man this game has horrible latency.
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
Couldn't they provide something else than a compressed jpeg full of jpeg artifact (zoom the large picture, you will see a the image is composed of 8x8 block of seemingly random pixels)
How is one supposed to know what the hell is in there if the jpeg compression moves the changed pixels around?
Nuke Dukem 4D :)
JPEG image can't be revealed one pixel at a time. JPEG image consists of 16x16 MCU (Minimal Coding Units) encoded with DCT and high harmonics discarded (actually, there's more to this). Changing one pixel before encoding changes the whole 16x16 square.
Unfortunately, due to the Slashdot effect, no one can see the picture as it changes. Ergo, no one can win.
Good way to stress-test their web-servers, though.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
The full image is 1280x960. 14 days for the full image.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
There are a few 'interesting' properties of the image that they've posted; firstly the noise doesn't appear to be randomly distributed - there are many more samples in the center of the intensity scale than in the fully dark/fully light regions. The green channel also appears to have a much broader distribution curve than the red or blue channels.
To get an idea of what might be in the image I can think of a few methods that might provide some insight; performing a low pass filter (eg. gaussian filter) and enhancing what remains with the levels control in photoshop (this should help remove the random high frequency element, but of course you also end up losing all detail in whatever image is left), or if anyone feels up to it, performing an autocorrelation of the image with itself may help (essentially using the profile of the noise in the image to figure out what parts are significant).
Of course, with only ~1.5% of the image revealed so far it's not very likely that there'll be much to see yet - it's likely that all the meaningful data has been buried in the jpeg noise..