Coming Next Tuesday

Next week we'll be adding a new trick to the Jerx App based on the Wisdom of Crowds reveal I talked about yesterday. It's called:

It's the same idea, but instead of a book, or a phone call, the information is revealed online. 

There's a significant issue with that idea though. You know what happens if you say to people, "Hey, there's this website that you plug some basic information into and it will tell you what random word you're likely thinking of based on a data mining process." Your friend will say, "Oh, cool. Give me the website. I want to try it out with my friends too."

To prevent that sort of thing, this is presented as some hidden section of the "dark web" that you have to have special access to. The Dark Web is the truly unregulated part of the internet that requires specific software and authorizations to access. Because I'm not a connoisseur of child pornography, I don't really know that it looks like or acts like. But that's good. That means your average spectator doesn't either. So when you have to use your phone and visit this weird URL, this actually adds to the intrigue. "This isn't a site that just anyone can access. What they're doing here... the shear volume of data they're collecting and processing... is insane. It's actually kind of disturbing." 

So you bring up this dark web site (in the process, you code in the word the spectator is thinking of) on your phone. 

You have the spectator enter their information in the form.

After they hit submit there is a semi-long wait while the site processes the information against its vast databases.

Then it spits out the results. In this case, the person had thought of the word "Coffee."

One of the really clever things here—and I can say that because it was completely Marc Kerstein's idea—is that the third entry in the list will be a synonym for their thought-of word (assuming there is one). As if to suggest the algorithm knew it was likely you would be drawn to a particular idea, but just wasn't certain which word you would use to express that idea.

That part where it says, "If the thought-of word wasn't in the potential word list," etc., that's just there for verisimilitude. If the word isn't in the list, it's because you screwed up, dummy.

Thanks to Seth Raphael for allowing us to use his input method, and, of course, to Marc Kerstein who built and maintains The Jerx app.

The app update should be available on Tuesday. You'll be able to find instructions for it in the app itself. Swipe two fingers to the right on the L'il Jerxy opening screen to get to that.