I wonder if you could predict if someone prefers to enter numbers using the top row of the keyboard vs the numeric pad by asking them to create a long random number.
Obviously, people will have a tendency to not reuse the same finger twice in a row, and also not use a key adjacent to the previous key.
The question is… what’s the shortest number you can ask someone to generate and get a good idea of which input method was used, and what’s the shortest number to determine if it was a truly random number or a human generated random number.

August 13th, 2009 | Mental Note: Add Category | No comments

I completely forgot about this mIRC script I made back in 2000, but apparently I was ahead of my time. I wrote a crowdsourcing script before there was crowdsourcing. The script was very simple, query it with !hme <name of show> and the script replies with how many episodes it thinks are in the show. To contribute, anyone could say !hme.add <name of show> <number of episodes>. I did have a blacklist of people who couldn’t add, but I don’t think I ever had to use it. You didn’t care about the accuracy of the name of the shows, because the script searched the best fit, and if there were duplicate variations (Evangelion vs Neon Genesis Evangelion), it didn’t matter. I just stored extra information. The last time the script was used… 2002… it had 500 entries.

August 13th, 2009 | Life=Boring, Mental Note: Add Category, Neato!, Nerd | No comments