Geoguessr 2014 Jan. 15 Challenge

For old hands the challenge is in the next message.

There are three basic ways to play geoguessr:

-Stand in place, look at the panorama and guess.
-Drive down the road/s until you come to something recognizable or searchable on Google
-Do a timed challenge where you can drive, but not forever

The person who posts the challenge says what they did, which doesn't mean that you have to do it that way (Though I don't think you can turn a timed challenge into an untimed challenge or vise versa). However, if you do something else, obviously the scores aren't really comparable.

This one was hard, so if you haven't played before, you might want to do one on your own before attempting this one.

This challenge goes until Jan 31, when we'll do a post mortum. The Feb. 15 challenge should be started by the player in January whose LT username is next closest to aulsmith in alphabetical order. If it's your turn and you want to pass, say so.

10981 by the stand-in-place method. Oddly enough I made exactly the same mistake as you in round four. Might have done much better in round 3 if I'd spent more time checking out photographs of trains - I guessed too hastily and got the wrong railway in the right country...

3: That's very good for stand-in-place. I would have been way off on #1 if I hadn't traveled. I picked up a lot of points there.

>4 aulsmith:
Mostly luck in rounds 1 and 2, coupled with a certain amount of GeoGuesser experience. I've got the sandy southern countries wrong so often that I must have learnt something along the way...

As thorold played, so I did the stand-in-place routine. But, I didn't fare so well score-wise; 9062 points. For a stand-in-place game, I don't think that I've played a tougher one. On some rounds there were just about no clues. I think that I'm getting to the point where I recognize some hills, vegetation and soil. Perhaps I need a life...

On the sunny side, I did pretty well (all over 2,000 points) for a not moving game on rounds 1, 2, 3 & 5. On the cloud burst side, round 4 was something of a disaster. Or, is being on the wrong continent okay?

6: You would have had to move a whole bunch more than I did in round 4 not to be on the wrong continent--unless you're really good at grass and tree identification.

>7 aulsmith: It's the lowest single round score I've gotten, very close to literally a half world away. I would have done better just randomly sticking the pin in the map without even thinking about it at all.

>6 bookblotter:,7
I had another look at Round 4, out of idle curiosity, and found that there is an unambiguous clue if you go some way along the road. And there were a couple of other strong hints along the way, quite apart from the vegetation, which also becomes more and more obvious when you look at it with hindsight... At least we all got the wrong continent, so far, so none of needs to be too embarrassed!

I guess I'll play this standing still then. A difficult way to play, I find.

>10 stellarexplorer: Stellarexplorer, how much faith do you have in our collective wrongheadedness on round 4? Just try to figure out where you think you might be and, if your play and thought process is consistent with the three of us, just pick the spot on the other side of the globe and you're a winner! Could work???

It's a plan!

Bump. In case anyone is twiddling their thumbs this weekend and wishing they could do something new.

It is impossible to locate the exact position of a scenery photograph to a nearest 1,000 km away . The world map is too small to locate a exact position in a particular country.
What is the highest score achieved by a LT's member so far?

The website should have a larger world map , the chances to locate the approximate spot in the world will be at least a zero error of approx 50,000 km away.

A very score of less distance achieved closest to the exact locations is very difficult.

I will study the buildings,vegetations, road, atmosphere,landmarks and any tell-tales "clues" of a location's feature.

14: Welcome razzamajazz!

You can zoom in on the map, though it's usually helpful to have Google maps open in another tab as they tend to show different things. We've been able to pin the actual building or street corner at times.

The highest score possible is around 26000. stellarexplorer and bookblotter have both come really close using the traveling method. The highest score I've gotten is around 20000, but my browser is slow, and I'm impatient.

http://www.geoguessr.com

(To play alone, no challenger )

16: Thanks! That and some other helpful information is on the group page. We've been doing this for a while on the Atlases and Maps group and we're forgetting what new people need to know.

Is there any consensus for the group challenge whether you stand still or travel around?

I got 9740 on this one by standing still.

I find it fascinating that you can be a continent away on one guess and within 50 miles the next for a place you've seen before.

18: No, I messed up by not making an explicit statement about what I did, so I traveled while everyone else stood still. So there's more competition for the standing still.

I find it fascinating that you can be a continent away on one guess and within 50 miles the next for a place you've seen before.

I find it fascinating how many places look like my home territory to me, until I start to do really detailed analysis.

#15 The highest score possible is around 26000. stellarexplorer and bookblotter have both come really close using the traveling method.

Seems like the highest possible score is in excess of 30000, I just scored 32379. Admittedly I spent a couple of hours travelling around.

ETA. Sorry, I should add that is not my score for the current round, I got carried away playing.

20: Well, so much for my memory. I should have looked it up. I'll try to do that tomorrow.

I hope you're enjoying it. We think it's really interesting "driving" around places we'll most likely never see.

You can be a globe trotter without leaving your home, just by using your eyes staring and exploring the world at your computer. It is really a time waster online "game" , but if you have time to spare , it is actually a relaxing time to pin-point unfamiliar locations of the world with a bit of "logic" and "street smart" techniques in evaluating the location's tell-tale clues, such as traffic sign posts, language used on the posts, vegetation- type of trees, "feeling" the weather of the location, the sky's appearance, the road's condition and type, the people's faces-to spot their nationality or race(noticed faces are being blurred), the appearance of buildings - types,prominent landmarks/ road signs, the location's atmosphere/surroundings and some "clues" that we overlooked.

Are you being addicted to this game?

Link:

http://www.geoguessr.com

Let us play the game, "standing still", "driving and walking around", timer- on or off.

Register your score.

Score Achieved: 8664 -" Standing Still"

The highest possible score per round is, I believe, 6,500 points or a total of 32,500 per "perfect" game. Both numbers seem strange to me. You might think that the high total for a round would be, say, a nice even 10,000 or 20,000 and 5X those numbers for a game. But, "No" per the powers that be at geoguessr.

In the previous play, most people played wandering about which gives the opportunity for a higher score, but it takes quite a bit of time usually to zero in closely on the point. There is also the opportunity inside geoguessr itself to play with a built in time limit per round. I did try 5 minutes or 10 minute time limits playing alone.

For what it's worth, I think 5 minutes is too short to do much good in most cases. To me, a 10 to 20 minute time limit per round seems about right if you wanted to play with a time limit.

Impossible to hit a perfect score. A round of 5 locations to be "guessed" correctly.

A score of above 20,000 to 25,000 is reaching a "marksman" status. A very ideal score to achieve.

>25 supercell: That's even a stranger pair of point numbers than I thought in posting #23. It would be interesting to know the logic or necessity, if any, behind those numbers. Maybe geoguessr is just playing with our minds? :)

12455. Standing still, which, frankly, is not my preferred method. I enjoy painstaking searches, but I understand the satisfaction of a thorough look at one still place and moment. I got almost zero on #4, by faulty reasoning, which I take it will be discussed later.

I forgot to reread the above posts, or would have guessed #4 contrary to reason, and no doubt would have gotten more than 56 points.

>27 stellarexplorer: If you got 56 points on #4 we're very close. I received a magnificent 62 points. It's amazing that we're pretty consistent on #4. Overall though, your score on the rest was quite good.

One logical deduction helped a great deal, but no spoilers yet.

And I did manage to get the country right on three of the five, and the region on the fourth.

Today's the day to start discussing this round. I'm afraid I don't have a lot of time today, so all I can comment on is what I remember, which isn't a whole lot.

1. Landing seemingly in the middle of nowhere, I drove down the road and found a very useful sign which got me very close to the actual place. Whew. Otherwise my score would have been dismal. I think someone else found some really clever way to figure this one out without driving.

4. A deciduous forest, a road with white lines and a mountain in the view with a bald spot. I drove down the road for a while trying to get nearer the mountain to see if the bald spot was a rock face, a rock slide or a clear cut. After I got bored with driving, the mountain seemed no nearer, so I gave up and picked a country with deciduous forests, white road markings and mountains: Norway. I would have gotten closer if I'd randomly stuck the pointer in almost any desert on the planet.

5. Here road signs got me in trouble. I was getting tired and wanted to get on with Real Life. I did a quick Google search on a name from a road sign, found multiple places with that name, stuck my pointer in the middle and found I was in the wrong country. More careful searchers got more points.

I'm especially interested in hearing what the stand still people did!

Well, as I said in posting #6 above, I was a stand still person on this round. Aulsmith, on the disaster round, #4, I beat you by the not-so-magnificent margin of 6 points through dumb luck. It's costly when you're on the other side of the world. I swear that, when I'm playing a stand still round, anytime I'm queasy about where I think I am, I'm going with Australia (I've said that before).

On the other rounds, I did better (can you do worse than on #4?). On #1 I was in Botswana vs South Africa, not too bad. On #2 I was in the Northern Territory of good old Australia vs Queensland. On #3, it's leaked out of my head and on #5 I went for Poland and my crummy memory says that the mark was in Croatia.

NOTE:, I believe that bernsad is next, alphabetically speaking, so should be the challenger on the next go around, on February 15th; answers due by the last day of the month. Could you caption your new topic as "2014 February 15 Challenge." Thanks!

If anyone has an opinion on frequency of play and the gap between the challenge and the end of the round, they might say so here???

(Standing still)

1. Dry, sandy, overtaking restriction seems to imply that it's a drive-on-the-left country, so Oz or southern Africa. Nothing obviously Australian, so I plonked at random somewhere around the top of South Africa, and got lucky (within a couple of hundred km, I think).

2. Red dust road, gum trees, looked very much like the bits of tropical Australia I've seen, so I guessed somewhere around Darwin: it turned out to be North Queensland, so I had the right latitude but was quite a way out.

3. The railcar looked very Japanese, and there were Japanese-style railway signals to be seen a little way along the line (trains are one of my things...). So I looked at pictures of Japanese trains on Google until I found one with a similar livery, and then guessed at a station on that railway that looked plausible on the map. And I was wrong: it was another line altogether, in a different part of Japan. I didn't take into account the obvious clue of the recent earthquake damage, which would have put me much nearer.

4. Much more temperate than 2, and I misread the shadow of the Google car, leading me to think it was the northern hemisphere, so I stuck a pin into Finland. With hindsight, I should have seen that they were gum trees...

5. Obviously Europe, and from the landscape and style of the houses probably eastern Europe. Recent-looking war memorial, ruined castle on the hill, rustic sign not quite legible in the photo but with Roman characters (not Cyrillic), and a flag with red over white and blue: it had to be Croatia. Since Croatia is roughly X-shaped I stuck a pin in the middle of the X and was quite close.

You've covered it well thorold. The only thing that boosted my score was #3, where I was able to narrow down the location by means of a tiny station sign visible in the initial location image.

Interestingly, getting Finland in #4 - I'm guessing here - while far closer than most of us were, probably is far enough away that it doesn't give a huge points boost. What did you receive on that round, thorold?

>33 stellarexplorer:
Round 4 was somewhere in NSW, I think, so Finland was still almost half a world away. I don't remember my score, but I can't have got appreciably more points than aulsmith. 1 and 5 were the rounds where I picked up most points, and 1 especially was pure luck.

#3: Obviously Japan. One thing I'm good at is telling Chinese and Japanese apart. I remember seeing some kind of sign which looked like it was a map of the railroad line. It looked like there was water below the railroad line so I found a railroad line on the southern cost of the big northern island--and was wrong. It was on the northern coast of the next island south. This is why I worry about traveling in countries where you can't read any of the signs. It's so easy to get things backwards, or in this case, upside down.

>35 aulsmith: The beauty (and surprise) of the sign I saw at the railway station was that it was in English.

36: Oh, yeah. I remember that now. My resolution wasn't good enough to read much of it. But maybe that' must be how I got the right set of islands.