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Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

whichyr.com

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Re: Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

#181
post #48
post #44

I wanted to play more but couldn't find any way. Refresh page, no new game link, tried entering URL again. Checked but no cookies to delete. That's one way to ensure I never visit the site again.

To be fair it's a daily challenge. Try again tomorrow. But yes, I would love it if there were more game modes (similar to GeoGuessr)

I like things I can improve my skill on. This works by getting a stream of feedback as I study what I did and the errors I made, then try again with changes. Having only 5 rounds a day (assuming it resets each day) greatly limits this. This limitation seems more like an attempt to make me use it in a certain way (make it part of my daily routine). That's off-putting. I wanted to sit there grinding over dozens of photos and watching my skill improve in real-time.

Re: Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy, I was off by 7 years and 427km on my first guess and I don't want to play anymore because I've surely peaked

I just got one that was off by 2 years and 24.2 meters , but it was kinda cheaty because it showed Barbara Bush on the South lawn of the White House.

Ha, I just got that same one! I managed to guess the year (1/4 chance), and only 15.5 meters off.

Re: Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

#183
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as more of an experiment to gauge the capabilities of AI than an attempt at cheating. I'm impressed that AI is that good.

Is it good, or are those photos already in the training data that the model was trained on? Would be interesting to see how well it would fare on five photos from different years, using pictures that have never previously been uploaded anywhere.

I would bet it would still do well. You can give a frontier LLM photos that it has never seen before and it will reason about them incredibly accurately, since is is trained on, well, a lot of other similar photos. You can easily try it yourself, give o3 a photo you have taken yourself of a random place, it will crop, zoom and analyze different sections of the photo until it gets most of the time the exact coordinates of where the photo was taken.

Re: Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

#185
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as more of an experiment to gauge the capabilities of AI than an attempt at cheating. I'm impressed that AI is that good.

Is it good, or are those photos already in the training data that the model was trained on? Would be interesting to see how well it would fare on five photos from different years, using pictures that have never previously been uploaded anywhere.

> are those photos already in the training data that the model was trained on?

The photos are of course in the training data. Most humans too, would have seen a large fraction of these photos before.

But associating it with a year is where the magic happens.

You are dismissing a technology capability that was science fiction a year or two ago.

Re: Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

#186

Great idea! The trick is to zoom into peoples clothing, and then the associated event becomes quite obvious. Eg. Photo of Disco, no crazy lapels, obviously towards the end of disco, which puts you within a year or two. Might have gotten lucky but zooming in on clothing got me to 1.8 years off on average (top 2%).

Pinch to zoom didn't work for me on Firefox for Android, and neither did double tapping.

Yeah Firefox has trouble with a decent fraction of web apps nowadays.

Not their fault of course, with people not testing with Firefox.

Re: Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

#187

There's a similar game, but for guessing both the year and the location https://timeguessr.com/ Discussed on HN a couple of years ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37203511 edit: found another game like OP in the linked thread https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html

Another for year + location https://whentaken.com/

I had to close it - the ads are all over the place.

Re: Which year: guess which year each photo was taken

#188
post #122

4580. Helps if you recognise the current affairs. Gay marriage, Arab spring, London Blitz came up. Leaving me with a party with a mix of drab and 70s disco clothing so I guessed 1981 and was close enough! The one that got me was some people at a beach in black and white.

I recognized the Arab spring and the London blitz.

The gay marriage one I couldn't put a date, but noticed a flip phone on the picture so I just guessed the highest number before iPhone release year and wasn't too bad.

The disco scene was clearly a 70s Pic so I just guessed smack in the middle of the decade.

The beach black and white I was the most off. I faintly remember that it was a big discussion point during the 20s that women should be allowed to wear "revealing" swimsuits,so again I went for a year in the decade. I was off

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