Win! Win! Win!
Jun 16, 2016
As a thanks to everyone who has been following the Thimbleweed Park blog and helping out with the game, we're going to giving away 5 entries into the Thimbleweed Park phone book, complete with (optional) voicemail message (but who wouldn't want to do that).
Guess how many people in the phone book (as of right now) have uploaded a voicemail, from A...
...to Z...
The contest is open to everyone, even people who already have an entry.
Five closest guesses get an entry in the phone book and the opportunity to upload a voicemail message. Ties will be resolved using officially sanctioned D&D combat rules (the D20).
Post your guess in the body of your message in the comments section.
In order to win, you must fill in your email address in the email field. DO NOT put your email address in the body of the message. If you post multiple guesses, only your last one will count.
I won't be cross posting this on Twitter, since they have their own contest... so shhhhhhhhh...
We'll pick a winner Monday morning.
- Ron
P. S. We'll be giving away another five entries next week.
CONTEST IS CLOSED
WE HAVE OUR WINNERS
The answer was 1100
Congratulations to...
P.Coltau
Nico
BertL
Mathias
Alberto
You will be getting an invite email in the next few hours.
Thanks for letting us try! This is fun.
531 Bottles of Beer
You take one down, pass it around,
530 Bottles of Beer On The Wall.
You take one down, pass it around, 529 bottles of beer on the wall!
You take one down, pass it around, 528 bottles of beer on the wall!
You take one down, pass it around, 527 bottles of beer on the wall!
Nice phonebook :-)
I change my answer: 169
4333!
26 * 2 * 18 + my guessing = 1872 !
So my new guessing is 666 !
:)
2684 is my guess!
Most countries use their given name as their first names, yet some (mostly Asian) cultures/languages have their family names or surnames as their first names. I would think the majority of the Thimbleweed player base would be more familiar with alphabetizing by last name (which would be the more common nomenclature).
Perhaps, it would have been good to ask if we want our name alphabetized by first or last name when we do/did our phonebook submissions.
Ron, I would ask you to rethink the decision to do alphabetizing by first name, and switch it to alphabetization by last name/surname.
If you wanted to get things perfect, you would have to consider special cases where "Mc" may be alphabetized as "Mac" and others (e.g. ignore apostrophes when parsing).
Here: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/recmgmt/forms/FilingRules.pdf?mswitch-redir=classic
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/recmgmt/forms/FilingRules.pdf
I just would have thought people would expect to see alphabetization by last name.
I know there's much more to worry about other than the alphabet, but I just wanted to voice my opinion of how weird it seems to me.
Could you find someone willing to donate time to write some code that will parse a string and spit out the phonebook formatting? The code could also be modify the set results during testing to out only include results that yield more than 1 blank space or period, for example. Heck, there's not *that* many names- maybe some red-headed intern could even do it by hand. :)
(Reworded)^^^^^^^^^^^
I personally dont like the habit to always order by family name. Of course there might be reasons to do so.
Though my own phonebook is sorted by firstname - simply because I think of my contacts the way I call them...
Maybe make the phone book sorting an option? :-)
;)
What would be cool is if he formatted the phone book where it would show a last name only once like so:
ADAMS Abigail
Amy
Ansel
Douglas
John
John Q
Samuel
ADDAMS Charles
Jane
http://i.imgur.com/Fph97PW.jpg
My guess is 824.
https://twitter.com/grumpygamer/status/742432915892502528
Reisdorf, Derrick
(first name="Reisdorf," and last name="Derrick")
It would be as if my name was the only name that appeared "normally" in the phonebook.
Is comma a prohibited character?
1,203
675
please please please!!
(hey, nobody said it has to be the absolute number, percentage is a valid response :)
I'll pick 1538 entries !
128
Or did you change the screen resolution of the art?
(As scientifically determined by estimating that we're seeing about 45% of A-letter entries, so that would be 80 total, and A appears about 11.6% time as a starting letter in English, so we get 80 / 0.116 = 690.)
199
(13 entries out of 45 shown have been uploaded (about 28.9%), so 690 * 0.289 = 199)
What is your reference?
Dictionary lemmas?
Wikipedia?
Are you sure this is valid also for people names?
Anyway, I am still a little disappointed, as this was a backer exclusive and it wasn't "cheap". Just "giving it away" makes the backer level noticeably less exclusive.
Having said this, my bet is: 321
And a half!
Question:
Will names like "Family [lastname]" or "[lastname] Family" e. g. "Threepwood Family" be accepted as well?
I recorded a voice msg together with my wife + 2 year old daughter.
I believe, Ron agreed to this in one of the previous posts ...
Better safe than sorry ;)
I'm going to make mine an answering machine message! ;)
glucas@aol.com
209-983-0401
869 TumbleShrub Lane
Modesto, CA 95397
Please don't share my information. I'm a very private person. Thank you.
The argument with mixing up people of other countries is, in my opinion, not valid. Those have different typo at all, would assume that name handling behaves like locale, means in this case US.
BR,
Ruben
That's not hexadecimal, huh... it's decimal!
FourThousandForty :-)
950
932
(data came from GuesserTron 3000 ™)
And for the very same reason we sort by first name, hehe. And I detected 24 special characters due to internationalization in our case.
666
If I don't win, can I have one of this things?
1) Can you tell me what The Secret of Monkey Island(tm) is?
2) Can you send me some grog?
3) Can you tell me which algorithm you used to randomly? generate non-repeating? number extensions in the phonebook? :)
Chapter 5: How the hell did I came up with this number? (253)
/
* Thimbleweed Phonebook Voicemail Guessing Algorithm
* TPVGA - Do find a better acronym before sending this to THE Ron Gilbert :)
*
* Let's see, how about...
* H.A.T.S.A.W. = Hapless Algorithm That Serves as Attention Wench
* And coincidentally sounds like a real pirate word :)
*
* I will milk every drop of blood from your body!
* How appropriate, you fight like a cow!
*
* Poser, why are you using C++?
* How appropriate, you code like a .NET programmer.
*
* @author Carmelo Vargas
*/
#include <iostream>
#include <cmath>
using namespace std;
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
// And here comes the extreme overuse of underscores and long names :)
cout << endl << endl;
cout << "******************************" << endl;
cout << "Thimbleweed Phonebook Voicemail Guessing Algorithm based on H.A.T.S.A.W." << endl;
cout << "********************************" << endl;
// Not very proud to say that coming up with HATSAW took more time than coding this :)
cout << endl << endl;
cout << "A long time ago in a galaxy, far, far away... hmmm... wait, wrong mythology, let me start this again, ack..." << endl;
cout << endl << endl;
cout << "Ego: Great Marie Laveau, please tell me my fortune, I wish to gain an entry to this book of phones." << endl;
cout << "Great Marie Laveau: I shall tell your fortune young man." << endl;
cout << "Great Marie Laveau: That which you seek, will not be for your numbers are speculative." << endl;
cout << "Ego: (...dissapointed...)" << endl;
cout << "Great Marie Laveau: But do not falter young man, I shall read your good fortune." << endl;
cout << "[... magic 8-ball is being consulted ...]" << endl;
cout << "Great Marie Laveau: You will die a painful and horrible death!" << endl;
cout << "Ego: WHAT???" << endl;
cout << "Great Marie Laveau: No, wait, this thing has a pending update..." << endl;
cout << "[... magic 8-ball starts updating ...]" << endl;
cout << "[... 10 hours later ...]" << endl;
cout << "Great Marie Laveau: This is unfortunate!" << endl;
cout << "Ego: Why?" << endl;
cout << "Great Marie Laveau: It says; failure to update 0x0AFF843F, I'll post this message on StackOverflow to see who can help." << endl;
cout << "Ego: Screw this, I shall seek my own fortune..." << endl;
cout << "[... tu tu turum tu tu, blah blah, some music that in my mind makes sense, blah blah blah ta ...]" << endl;
cout << endl << endl;
int names_per_page = 18; //except for Z
int voicemails_per_page = 5;
float voicemail_rate = (5.0f / 18.0f); //~= 0.27... => 27.7...%, this is unneeded but I feel clever using floating arithmetics :)
int letters_in_english_alphabet = 26;
int letters_in_english_alphabet_without_z = (letters_in_english_alphabet - 1);
// for Z
int names_in_z = 9;
int voicemails_in_z = ceil(names_in_z * voicemail_rate); //I know its 3 but I also feel clever using ceiling
// totals
//int total_names_without_z = names_per_page * 2 * letters_in_english_alphabet_without_z; //900, not needed
//int total_names = total_names_without_z + names_in_z; //909, not needed
int total_voicemails_without_z = voicemails_per_page * 2 * letters_in_english_alphabet_without_z; //250
int total_voicemails = total_voicemails_without_z + voicemails_in_z; //253 ... (drum rolls, tada)
//some fancy O/S dependant function can be used to pretty print the number in some color, but I'm too lazy for that at this moment :)
cout << "Ego: After much pain and suffering I figured out the entries in the phonebook should be " << total_voicemails << " voicemails." << endl;
cout << "Game Over!" << endl;
cout << endl << endl;
return 0;
}
LeChuck's Cave!!!!!111oneeleven!
347
Yes, much better.
I hope it's prime...
My guess is: 940
My guess: 1987
483.