The Mongolian Meta

There are some really cool geoguessr metas that aren't as much about memorizing the street view cars that I love. (Although, a few car metas are interesting such as the handful of African countries that required a security follow car to tail the Google car, or the “Kenya snorkel” on the more off road capable street view vehicle for Kenya.) One of these is that there is a geostationary satellite just south of Texas that most US satellite dishes will point to, so if you can find a house with a satellite dish on it then you can combine its angle with your compass and get a rough sense of the US region you are in.

Is this whole thing just a strategy guide for playing Geoguessr in one country?

Mirror as PDF: https://gwern.net/doc/cs/security/2021-kommu-themongoliangeo... (it doesn't appear to have been updated since 2021 and Google Docs are bad for longevity/discoverability/archiving).

This stuff must get outdated very quickly. Google could very well upload an entire new set of photos for Mongolian roads tomorrow. How do Geoguessers keep on top of that? Is there a central repo/db where they store the dates that each country, or even potentially province or town, get updated by google.

Im imagining some kind of RSS feed that Geoguessers all subscribe to which alerts them of a country update and they all scramble to catalog the new meta.

This is amazing, but surely analyzing the Google car itself would be against the spirit of the game for the hardcore players? Is it a standard tactic?

I was low key hoping for something Age of Empires II related... but GeoGuesser is fine, too.

Is there an index of resources that lists metas that people have put together for each country?

A quite complete and not so much focus on meta Geoguessor's guide can be found here if someone interested: https://somerandomstuff1.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/geoguessr-.... This single document is fantastic!

I'm mongolian and thanks for reminding me I don't know anything about mongolia.

Good to see some Geoguessr content on HN!

There’s something about this that reminds me of the “you’re just a kid” scene in Good Will Hunting.

i have new-found respect for geoguessers.

This is really distasteful to me.

All the time and effort spent optimizing a corner of the rules of a specific dataset of a game.

It strikes me as wasteful in the same vein as Bitcoin mining, but more than that, as running contrary to what learning is supposed to be.

Signifier replacing the signified, metrics standing in for reality.

It's interesting though, we hear so much about AI, this is a sport that could have been invented for AIs to do - judgement tasks with quantifiable results and quick repetition.