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?

  • @Wwwbdd@lemmy.world
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    832 months ago

    Who says they don’t already? I knew a guy who worked for a major government agency who’s job was to look over horrible pictures to try to figure out where they were taken.

    I bet the most skilled people do work for them, not just youtube. But talking to that guy, it’s a tough job, not for everyone. Instead of a random streetview image it’s a scene of abuse, so…

  • @Agent641@lemmy.world
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    592 months ago

    You can get jobs like that, sure. Normally called GIS analyst (geospatial informations systems)

    For a while, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service GIS job applications were less about ticking boxes and more looking at a satellite image of a structure and being asked, “what is this, where is it, and why is it interesting”

    And the answer might be "Its ostensibly a wastewater treatment plant, its in southern Iran, and its interesting because the truck parked next to the liquid chemical tank farm has an ISO gas storage trailer, not an ISO liquid storage container as might be expected.

  • @Microw@lemm.ee
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    262 months ago

    I’m sure that those agencies have been contacting top players for that game over the last few years. But if those simply dont want to work for them, thats moot.

    • FuglyDuck
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      212 months ago

      I wouldn’t be surprised to find they created the game. And if not, sponsored the competitions.

      Great way to scout that kind of talent.

  • @MataVatnik@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Israel intelligence has a division dedicated to neurodivergent people who scour satellite photos. So wouldn’t be surprised if they have people like this on payroll. A lot of ONSIT already have people like this participating doing geolocation on war footage.

  • @DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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    202 months ago

    The problem is getting the pictures to work from. People who don’t want to be found aren’t giving the CIA pictures of their locations, and I’d imagine the CIA already knows what road signs look like in different countries, or where certain mountains and other features are.

    The problem is getting the pictures. It’s intel collection, not processing.

    • @bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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      362 months ago

      the CIA already knows what road signs look like in different countries, or where certain mountains and other features are.

      I mean “the CIA” isn’t a person. Someone there does this work. Which is what we’re talking about.

      • @BruceTwarzen@lemm.ee
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        22 months ago

        If you read about what they did and how incompetent they are, i wouldn’t be surprised if they employ some nepotism guy who looks looks at pictures and goes: uuuh, not alabama.

    • @SolOrion@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • @driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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        22 months ago

        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”.

        • @SolOrion@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          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.

    • Chozo
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      52 months ago

      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.

      • Rhaedas
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        42 months ago

        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.

    • Mossy Feathers (She/They)
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      12 months ago

      It has a practically infinite set of images. Seriously, I’ve seen people do geoguesser and get nothing but back roads in the middle of basically Anywhere, Earth; I’ve seen people get stuck inside malls, go into caves, walk down random-ass rabbit trails in the middle of a forest surrounded by miles of fucking nothing (I wish I could remember what video I saw that in, it was fucking insane). Geoguesser pulls from the full catalog of Google Street view images, and there are a lot of street view images.

  • @SGforce@lemmy.ca
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    -222 months ago

    Really it’s crowdsourcing and statistics. Show an image to a big enough crowd and someone will pick something up. It’s like the birthday problem but with geography.

    • BarqsHasBite
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      362 months ago

      There really are some good geoguessers. It’s not a crowd source game.

      • FartsWithAnAccent
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        02 months ago

        There are but they’re part of the crowd: They’ve just been doing it so long they’re great at it.

          • FartsWithAnAccent
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            02 months ago

            Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but skill level does not really factor in as to whether something is crowdsourced. Are you just referring to the geoguessr website/game?

    • Trailblazing Braille Taser
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      2 months ago

      Not to pile on here, but this is not an instance of the birthday problem.

      The birthday problem would kick in if we asked “what are the chances that any two of these N people know the same place, whatever it may be.”

      But instead we’re discussing “what are the chances that one of these N people recognizes a specific place P.”

      Edit: maybe I’ve missed your point actually — were you saying that there are many details in one image, and the chances of some player recognizing one of those details is an instance of the birthday problem?

      • @Deestan@lemmy.world
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        32 months ago

        there are many details in one image, and the chances of some player recognizing one of those details is an instance of the birthday problem?

        That would be a valid model. But you are still right that it doesn’t apply: It would give the effect that a different geoguesser would get the picture right every test, while we are seeing consistent results from the top geoguessers.

    • @Deestan@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      I see your point, but the Birthday Problem would apply differently.

      It is the chance of “collision” between randomly picked elements from two large enough sets of comparable random data. If I understand correctly, the random data here would be “geographical fact” like bush density and road width. Set A is geoguessers’ geographical knowledge, and set B is pictures’ geographical features.

      So if we picked hundreds of random picture and hundreds of geoguessers and asked them, the chance of one guessing one image is high. And the person would be largely dfferent every time.

      In this case, we can give one specific geoguesser a large amount of pictures and that same geoguesser would get most of them right.