:PROPERTIES: :ID: 2fb3244c-8316-4602-a3dd-e107663af5d4 :mtime: 20250627093607 :ctime: 20250627093605 :END: #+title: Historcle #+filetags: :project:workproject:public: * About Historcle Historcle is a game inspired by wordle (https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html) where the player tries to guess a secret historical figure. ** How to play There is a secret historical figure, and the player will guess historical figures. For each guess, the system will output - How many kilometers apart they were born - How many years apart they were born - What tags/categories they shared (on Wikipedia) ** Example Game | Guess Number | Guess | Distance (km) | Time (years) | Hints | | 1 | Samuel Adams | 775 | 142 | Harvard University Alumni | | 2 | Rowan Atkinson | 5543 | 81 | Writer | | 3 | George Washington | 653 | 142 | Politician | * Technical Architecture The main technical backbone of this project was DBpedia https://www.dbpedia.org/ which is like a database for Wikipedia. The most frustrating part was the real knowledge has holes, incomplete data, inconsistent data formats. It's not neat like a created database. For example, sometimes the place of birth is a location and sometimes it's a string (in the case of a string, we cannot compute the distance between two figures). Also, the DBPedia SPARQL instance is very slow. I don't blame DBPedia for this, as it's hard to optimise, but I had to break down my large queries into many smaller queries so the player didn't think the game was broken. * Sharing Link Code (free and open-source): https://github.com/AtticusKuhn/historcle Play the game: https://atticuskuhn.github.io/historcle/