Spot the Ball

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.

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

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 <i>where</i> on that trajectory it was when the photo was taken, given the high speed of the ball.

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?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jgc.org&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;tonight-im-going-to-write-myself-aston.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jgc.org&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;tonight-im-going-to-write-myself...</a>

This is very fun for me, even as someone who&#x27;s not a sports fan. Great way to engage this other segment of readers.

It&#x27;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.

I remember seeing an arcade redemption machine that worked on the same principle. It had a database of hundreds of screenshots from soccer&#x2F;footy games and the player had to guess where the ball should be. The more accurate the guess; the more tickets the machine dispensed.

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

Good fun!<p>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&#x27;d still not be able to cheat the system.<p>Would be fun to crowd source a position taken from wrong guesses to provide some variance.<p>0: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;football&#x2F;shortcuts&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jan&#x2F;14&#x2F;how-to-spot-the-ball-in-spot-the-ball" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;football&#x2F;shortcuts&#x2F;2015&#x2F;jan&#x2F;14&#x2F;ho...</a>

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

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.

reminds me of bestofthebest&#x27;s car raffle... since you can&#x27;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

Did anyone actually read the article?

as a footy fan I enjoy this a lot - tho this time around I scored terribly compared to world cup a year ago<p>thanks _alastair for getting involved here - tons of great little insights