The Great When? A London-through-time quiz | Hacker News Reader

The Great When? A London-through-time quiz

monkeon.co.uk

73 pointsnotnice13 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wen in case anyone didn't get the reference.

Side comment: I just got the Normandy 2.0 map for DCS World, a PC flight simulator, which models 1940s English channel with northern France and southern England. Last night I flew across London, then down to the (7 sisters?) cliffs. Absolutely gorgeous rolling fields, buildings, factories etc - and a ticking Big Ben clock.

The biggest difference from the modern world as seen through Flight Simulator is in verticality, with the large body of buildings being relatively low, and perhaps materials - no massive walls of glass present at all.

They've done some stellar work on this - https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/shop/terrains/norm... .

What I really would love to see in games like MS Flight Simulator is time-machine scenarios, where you fly your time machine over an AI generated model of the world at a certain year, say 1492. Model generation should be guided by statistics and estimates for the particular year (such as historical maps, population density, vegitation types, settlement types, ...) and might by supplemented by "manually" created items, were we have specific knowledge of something (like a 3D model of the Tower of London at this time).

Super fun! Obviously I wouldn’t do this on purpose because it defeats the object of the game but if you watch this on an iPhone, you can pull down the Notification Centre and it’ll show you the title of the video you’re watching as part of the media controls. The title has the year in it.

I averaged 1.4 years out, so not too bad I guess. Mostly on fashion sense and cars/taxis/buses, but also a few other things like Downing Street gates, pedestrianization of Trafalgar Square, types of camera tourists are using. Surprisingly many little clues once you get into it.

I got one really badly wrong (17 years for a 1990s video of the tube that felt more recent - there wasn't much to go on...)

But 2 or 3 years for the others. Luckily I got one of the blitz!

One that I had opened with "London 1987" at the start... That was easy, as was the 1908 Olympics one.

Had one which had a ton of clues -- no smoking on the underground, Ongar still open, phone numbers being "01-xxx-xxxx" rather than 071, etc.

A video shot in the 2010s would look very different quality than one in the 1990s though. And you'd see people on mobile phones.

Be careful on using video quality for the metagame, one of the videos is full colour, high-def, 50Hz but has squaddies in WW2 uniform: it's enhanced footage from 1945

I got 2.8, which I think is not too bad for a non-Brit, since I didn't ‘cheat’ by looking up clues I didn't already know.

I was pretty happy to get 6 year average. I think getting approximately the right decade was all I was trying for.

For a date guessing game like this, check out https://chronophoto.app

The fashions in the last 30 years have been remarkably static, the only real way of telling the year was the hair.

Cars in 1995 look very different to today, but the biggest difference is the lack of people staring at phones

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