Sudden Death

[Teaos]

Probably does what I do. Cheat. Although I get bored and tend to give up after 10ish.

[Sionnach Glic]

Yeah, I'm betting on cheating.

We're on to you, Avenger!

[IanKennedy]

Probably does what I do. Cheat. Although I get bored and tend to give up after 10ish.

Just how do you cheat? The only way you can do that is to use two separate computers, even then you have to have separate IP addresses, so anyone on ADSL or Dialup is not going to get past the cheat detection systems.

[Sionnach Glic]

Could you do it with a laptop and a main computer?

[Teaos]

Probably does what I do. Cheat. Although I get bored and tend to give up after 10ish.

Just how do you cheat? The only way you can do that is to use two separate computers, even then you have to have separate IP addresses, so anyone on ADSL or Dialup is not going to get past the cheat detection systems.

Mwahaha silly Ian. If I tell you how I cheat you'll stop me doing it.

Not that it really matters. I still only get up to like 10-15 before getting bored and giving up.

[Graham Kennedy]

Yeah, but it will stop others too, people who DON'T stop at 10 - 15.

The 475 definitely looks like a cheat. I've managed scores in the 40s before now, I can imagine people getting 60 or 70, maybe even up to 100. But when you see scores of 300, 400+ it's pretty obviously cheating. The mind boggles at the kind of person who will sit there patiently for what must be a good hour or so cheating on 475 questions just so he can have a position on a table that he doesn't really deserve.

I'm actually tempted to remove the all time high scores for this reason. There's no point having it if it isn't honest.

[Mark]

Of course we don't KNOW that some obsessed fan spent hours answering every single question that there is.

Just out of curiousity, how many questions are on sudden death?

[shran]

It seems some questions are roulated in and out, especially planets seem to change a lot, and sometimes new things get added. It is expanding, but it is getting less and less likely to get the same questions, I believe.

[Sionnach Glic]

I'm sure the new film will give us lots of new questions.

[shran]

Personally, i think that will take a while. Even now, not all of the The voyage home species shown in the Federation are in the Sudden Death.

[stitch626]

Thats because many of them are Species number xxxx.

[shran]

COnsiderable nmbers among them also have names.

[Graham Kennedy]

Actually, there is no bank of questions at all, as such.

The site is stored as a set of databases. So for people there is a database entry for each person with a field for name, one for picture, and one for their bio. All the sudden death does is randomly choose a person, put their picture up, put their name as an answer, then take names from other people at random for the other possible answers. There's a question format like that for each database - one for battles, planets, nebulae, etc. The system just picks randomly between databases, then chooses a random entry in the database.

The entire thing is totally automated; any time I add a person, the sudden death is just as likely to pick them as anybody else. The high score tables are also generated automatically; the entire thing is completely maintenance free.

That Ian is a clever bugger

[stitch626]

That is awesome. So much better than what I had thought.

[Mark]

But if there is no time limit on answering the question, what's to stop them from looking up the corrasponding data on the site, and getting the right answer?