A coupla weeks back, I gave a talk at the 2011 GC Summit. (Many thanks to Shinteki and Snout for organizing!) My talk was about time and the 2-Tone Game. E.g., at what time of day did teams mostly play? How long do teams take if they're allowed to take their time? In theory, there'll be a video up soon; for now you can look at the slides. But there's not much material in the slides. I'm so starved for attention that I saved all the good info for the spoken part; I didn't want people to look away from me up at some silly slides, for goodness' sake. Anyhow, the core of my talk was looking at my web site logs to figure out when teams were playing the game.
"The Stupid Hours" came up. It's an idiomatic phrase amongst all-night puzzlers. Somewhen around 3-5am, most folks aren't at their best, thinking-wise. Jesse had a good question: How stupid are they? How stupid are our hours? Had I looked to see when people made wrong answers? I hadn't. But I promised to. Here's what I got
00 29 01 50 02 00 03 20 04 20 05 ?? 06 00 07 55 08 50 09 55 10 51 11 22 12 22 13 28 14 37 15 27 16 39 17 36 18 34 19 37 20 51 21 44 22 42 23 48
That's a break down, by hour of the day. For each hour, we have a "stupidity" percentage. That's a percentage of weird answers being submitted to the site. Of course, that might not be a sign of stupidity. Maybe it's just that some team's especially eager to try out half-baked guesses.
Unfortunately, so few teams played during the "stupid hours" that there wasn't much data there. Like, you're looking at 1am and saying, "So that 50%... was that 1 out of 2?" And I'm all "You think I'd show you data that low quality? It's actually 4 of 8." I.e., these are not wonderfully trustworthy statistics; provided for entertainment purposes only.
Another relevant comment that someone brought up: When I talked about teams who were willing to stay up late vs those who said "Ah, we'll pick it up again tomorrow", someone pointed out that out-of-towner teams would be more likely to stay up late because no $&#*ing way are we driving back-and-forth to San Francisco another time just to finish off this little game. Was that Kai who pointed that out? It's only been a couple of weeks, you'd think I'd remember. Anyhow. Indeed, good point.
