Earlier this year, thousands collaborated together in an effort known as "Twitch Plays Pokemon" to play through the Pokemon video games on Twitch TV, which has reportedly been acquired by Google. It involved the viewers spamming the commands they expect the player to do in the chatbox and, over a 30 second period, the command that has been spammed the most would be performed by the character. The first game played reached a total of 55 million views, 1.16 million unique participants, and had an average constant amount of 8,000 participants. After 16 days of continuous gameplay, the first game was beaten, and the collaboration continued to beat every other Pokemon game.
Since then, people have been hungry for more.. something different-- maybe even something new, and their wish has been granted.
A three by three grid has been set up over the bowl, and depending on where he swims it would invoke the relevant command. The "Randomize" command shuffles the grid.
Enter "Fish Plays Pokemon." This isn't a crowdsourced attempt at playing the game, instead, it is a lone fish named "Grayson Hopper." Originally created as a project for HackNY, a camera tracks his movements and depending on where he swims to in his bowl, it would invoke a relevant command. So far, Grayson has clocked in over 135 hours at the game, and has acquired his first Pokemon-- a Charmander named "AAAABBK." He has also defeated his first opponent-- a rival's Squirtle. The game does have its shortfalls however; Grayson spends a lot of his time in the upper-left portion of his bowl (this particular breed of fish rises to the top to breath) so he would constantly spam that command. At the time of writing, the command in the upper-left corner is "left," and Grayson's player is facing a wall, unable to continue moving.
As Grayson spams the "left" command, it leaves the viewers mixed between happiness and frustration
Although this may appear to be something merely humorous, and it is, it actually reintroduces a concept introduced by a French mathematician over 100 years ago: the infinite monkey theorem suggests that a monkey tapping away at random keys on a typewriter for an infinite length of time will almost surely reproduce a text such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In this case, the experiment would serve to show that with enough time, even a fish like Grayson unwittingly entering random commands towards the Pokemon video game could ultimately finish it. That's assuming he lives that long, anyway.
An official subreddit has been set up for "Fish Plays Pokemon", and an official IRC channel is available on Freenode at #phishplayspokemon.
Source: Twitch.tv
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