Quantumstate’s Blog

A friend recently told me about a game called FreeRice. Basically they ask you for the definition of a word and for every word that you answer correctly 10 grains of rice are sent to help stop world hunger. As you get more words correct the difficulty level increases. The game gives you a vocab level so you can keep track and compare yourself to your friends. I ended up with a vocabulary level staying around 35/36, although with my parents helping we managed to get up to about 45 peaking at 47. The score is out of 50. The game checks how hard words are by looking at how many people have previously answered them correctly, this is similar to the 20Q method.

Since the site only tells you about the number of grains of rice I decided to investigate further and look at what the rice was worth in terms of how many people it could feed. Luckily I had access to Wikipedia which could provide all of the information that I needed.

Wikipedia already has a dedicated page on rice which helpfully tells us that 10000 grains are needed per person per day so that is 1000 correctly answered questions. That does seems like an awful lot of questions so this is clearly not the most efficient way to stop world hunger, a better method would be to get a part time job and just donate the money earned.

But that said, it is a fun game to play and of course it does help quite a bit if loads of people play it. There was story I heard about a man who walked along a beach where there were thousands of starfish washed up on the sand after a storm and he came across another man who was throwing some back into the sea. The first man asked the second why he bothered because he was hardly making any difference. The second man replied that it made a difference to the one that he threw back into the sea.

So although it may not seem significant on the large scale of the many millions who are near starvation but it does make a difference to somebody.

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.