Seriously I’ve seen a guy see a bunch of pixels and go “Idk but that reminds me of Mexico” and he was right. There’s no way the three letter companies wouldn’t want that kind of skillset, right?
Seriously I’ve seen a guy see a bunch of pixels and go “Idk but that reminds me of Mexico” and he was right. There’s no way the three letter companies wouldn’t want that kind of skillset, right?
I just assume they’re super lucky. Or that they play so much, they recognize when it shows them the same picture because it doesn’t have an infinite set of images.
You should check out Rainbolt’s Geoguesser runs. He often narrates his thought process as he goes. He’s looking at things like the angle of the sun and shadows to determine what hemisphere of the planet he’s on, looks at the vegetation and soil types to further pinpoint his longitude, etc. He’ll even take photos sent directly to him from viewers, and he’ll find out exactly where the photo was taken, even if that image had never existed on the internet prior.
Some of these guys are insanely talented at this. Rainbolt is probably the most entertaining and educational, IMO. Definitely worth checking out some of his videos.
GeoWizard (especially his Geo Detective videos) and zi8gzag are also very talented. I love how they talk through the process to find a place, even though a lot of their initial starting points are from clues that they’ve seen hundreds of times to single out a region.
They use Google street view, so it’s a ton.
Like the other guy said, it’s street view. So the number of images isn’t quite infinite, but it’s high enough that just memorizing the images isn’t realistic.
Because of that, though, road patterns are a solid chunk of what the really good players are looking for/at. There’s definitely more to it than that, but because of the nature of the game there’s almost literally always a road in view.
My guess is that some memorization exists, check the geoguesser grand finals, there was one play where both players marked the exact same spot with absolutely no clues another that “maybe Mongolia”.
There’s definitely memorization, but there’s just a ton of tricks that aren’t explicitly memorizing the images themselves.
They can sometimes narrow down the area based on the car that’s taking the images, or how wide the lens is. As a made up example, if they see a red toyota corolla is the car taking the photos- which they can tell based on the mirrors appearing- they know it’s specifically mainland Malaysia.
Very small context based clues a lot of the time.