
Spot the Ball - mrbird
http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot-the-ball/2015/06/19
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_alastair
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.

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corbinpage
How do you construct the background image that replaces the ball?

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_alastair
That's the work of Sam Manchester, deputy editor on the Sports desk and chief
Photoshop wizard. I believe most of it is just cloning different parts of the
photo to cover up the ball, though it can get more complex. For example, on
the 4th photo of this previous round:

[http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot...](http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot-
the-ball/2014/06/17)

he actually cloned a players face from a different photo and pasted it in to
cover up the ball. I have no idea how he does it so well.

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taternuts
I was wondering how he did that one!!! Part of my thinking was that you'd
choose pictures that had the ball in an easy to photoshop location, and that
threw me off

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_alastair
I think he enjoys a challenge. Case in point, the last photo in this set:

[http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot...](http://projects.nytimes.com/interactive/sports/worldcup/spot-
the-ball/2014/06/19)

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usaphp
If you notice the outline of the ball has different size for each photo, this
allows to identify a relative distance where the ball is compared to height of
players

~~~
_alastair
Glad you noticed that! It's proof of the difference a great designer (in this
case, Rumsey Taylor of our News Design team) can make.

As a developer it can be quite humbling to realise how many seemingly tiny yet
actually really important touches exist in a project you think you know inside
out.

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smackfu
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.

~~~
_alastair
...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.

~~~
biot
I can relate. I mostly ended up around 55% overall per round (only slightly
above average) but I did get a 100% score on one photo which made up for some
spectacular fails.

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8_hours_ago
John Graham-Cumming wrote an article about trying to hack a contest similar to
this. I wonder if a similar technique could be used to find the ball on these
images?

[http://blog.jgc.org/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-
myself...](http://blog.jgc.org/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-myself-
aston.html)

~~~
danso
I started to roll my eyes when I saw your comment because I thought, "the NYT
made a fun web interactive with no-stakes and someone is pointlessly wondering
if the answers are in the source code"...so now I realize what a reflection
this is on how lame and limited my own thinking is :).

This was a great link...I've been casually brainstorming heuristics for
detecting possible Photoshopping and John writes about exactly that. I'm going
to walk through his algorithm using Python and PIL.

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tabrischen
This is very fun for me, even as someone who's not a sports fan. Great way to
engage this other segment of readers.

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hackuser
It's odd to see a casual game, with no other significance or meaning, in the
NY Times. It would be great to see them using interactive tools to tell news
stories more often.

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Klinky
Next they'll be putting crossword puzzles in the New York Times! Of all
places!

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DLWormwood
I remember seeing an arcade redemption machine that worked on the same
principle. It had a database of hundreds of screenshots from soccer/footy
games and the player had to guess where the ball should be. The more accurate
the guess; the more tickets the machine dispensed.

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jmhobbs
This is infuriating. I tried using where players were looking and it got me
squat. Very cool though.

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jpreiland
Yeah I found that the players' eyes were mostly useless but often times the
composition of the photo is helpful. For example, if players are gathered on
the right edge of the frame and there's a bunch of blank space to the left,
the ball is likely over in the open area

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_puk
Good fun!

My understanding of the UK version of this was that the ball was actually
placed by a group of pundits[0], rather than being in the original location,
so even if you found a freeze frame of the original match you'd still not be
able to cheat the system.

Would be fun to crowd source a position taken from wrong guesses to provide
some variance.

0:
[http://www.theguardian.com/football/shortcuts/2015/jan/14/ho...](http://www.theguardian.com/football/shortcuts/2015/jan/14/how-
to-spot-the-ball-in-spot-the-ball)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I like that - a "most popular guess" vs "actual position" would be really
interesting. As we seem to have at least one of the developers in this thread,
maybe we can make that happen (or at least a post-mortem blog post analysing
the data?)

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namuol
For me this quickly became "spot the photoshop artifact". I only noticed it
clearly for one photo and did marginally better than average (58% -- some
guesses were way off) Still very fun.

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Rexxar
The second time, after removing the cookie, is much more easy (~46% to
99.67%). The conclusion is that there are, for the moment, few cheaters.

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bherms
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

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knodi123
a group of judges? but... isn't there one objective correct answer?

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

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mholt
Did anyone actually read the article?

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ChrisArchitect
as a footy fan I enjoy this a lot - tho this time around I scored terribly
compared to world cup a year ago

thanks _alastair for getting involved here - tons of great little insights

