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Spot the Ball

projects.nytimes.com

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Re: Spot the Ball

#31

Post by blazingfrog2 »

smackfu wrote: post #16

Neat idea, but is this something you can actually be skilled at? Even if you know the game, and can figure out what trajectory the ball was on, it seems very hard to figure out exactly where on that trajectory it was when the photo was taken, given the high speed of the ball.

After logging many thousand of hours of dutifully watching soccer (over 30 years of full-on love for the game), I was able to match the given situations to similar ones I'd seen before and get close enough most of the time. It's still all probabilities at the end of the day.

Following the direction players are looking is just one parameter and can be wildly inaccurate without any information on the angle and velocity of the ball at the time of the shot. One of the trickiest situations is when 2 players jump for the ball, usually coming from a goalkeeper's clearance, so high and fairly fast, and collide in the air (often closing their eyes): the ball could literally be anywhere.

Re: Spot the Ball

#32

Post by Swizec »

_alastair wrote: post #2

I'm one of the people that made this interactive - funny to see it on Hacker News! If anyone has any questions about it, let me know.

How do you calculate accuracy? Sometimes I clicked in almost the opposite corner of the ball and it said I did better than 80% of readers.

Are you just calculating how close my guess is to the most densely clicked spot even if the ball is not actually in that spot?

Re: Spot the Ball

#33

Post by blazingfrog2 »

jdrock wrote: post #29
emodendroket wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you? It seems like if you were skilled enough you could figure it out by the reactions of various players in the photos with more than one or two people in them.

Trying to triangulate based on where players' eyes are looking rarely works. In many cases, the goalie is looking in a completely different direction than where the ball is. I guess that's why they're getting scored on.

Don't forget that the ball can come very fast and the keeper will need a split second to adjust. In other cases, the kicker can be masked by another player preventing the keeper to see the ball until very late.

Re: Spot the Ball

#34

Post by _alastair »

Swizec wrote: post #32
_alastair wrote: post #2

I'm one of the people that made this interactive - funny to see it on Hacker News! If anyone has any questions about it, let me know.

How do you calculate accuracy? Sometimes I clicked in almost the opposite corner of the ball and it said I did better than 80% of readers. Are you just calculating how close my guess is to the most densely clicked spot even if the ball is not actually in that spot?

The accuracy is calculated compared to other readers, so if you all clicked on the wrong corner you can still be better than 80% of them!

I mostly did it this way because there's no hard number that makes sense here - we don't know ft/metres, and pixels aren't a unit everyone is used to thinking about.

Re: Spot the Ball

#35

Post by _alastair »

smackfu wrote: post #16

Neat idea, but is this something you can actually be skilled at? Even if you know the game, and can figure out what trajectory the ball was on, it seems very hard to figure out exactly where on that trajectory it was when the photo was taken, given the high speed of the ball.

...sort of?

That's kind of the genius of puzzles like these (we can't take credit for inventing it - Spot the Ball has existed for a long time in the analog world) is that it's a mix of skill and luck, so you can fool yourself into thinking you're amazing at it, when in reality the next photo might trip you up completely.

Re: Spot the Ball

#36

Post by wooyi »

_alastair wrote: post #2

I'm one of the people that made this interactive - funny to see it on Hacker News! If anyone has any questions about it, let me know.

Do you know if these kinds of interactive content perform better (ie clicks/shares/views) vs other forms, ie longform or just plain data visualization pieces? I personally enjoyed it a lot.

Re: Spot the Ball

#37

Post by Serow225 »

_alastair wrote: post #11
ehmorris wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting to see the density of others' guesses. It doesn't seem to show every other guess though — how do you choose which ones to show?

Correct, it doesn't render all clicks (I dread to think how browsers would react if I tried) - all the results are put through a k-means cluster analysis at regular intervals to produce approximately 30 visible results. The percentages are calculated relative to all the clicks, though.

Nifty. So do each of the guesses shown account for a roughly equal number of clustered clicks, or do some of them aggregate more clicks than others?

Re: Spot the Ball

#38

Post by danso »

_alastair wrote: post #2

I'm one of the people that made this interactive - funny to see it on Hacker News! If anyone has any questions about it, let me know.

How did Maureen Dowd do on it?

Re: Spot the Ball

#40

Post by bherms »

knodi123 wrote: post #25
bherms wrote: post #9

reminds me of bestofthebest's car raffle... since you can't really gamble in the UK, they do a skill based game that is exactly this... you buy guesses and then click where you think the ball is... the person each week with the closest guess to where a group of judges says the ball is wins the car of their choice

a group of judges? but... isn't there one objective correct answer?

Yeah, I'm confused as to why they need judges as well, but it's how they do it...
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